William Ellery Channing

Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.

— William Ellery Channing

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

— William Ellery Channing

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

— William Ellery Channing

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

— William Ellery Channing

Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.

— William Ellery Channing

It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.

— William Ellery Channing

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

— William Ellery Channing

He is to be educated not because he's to make shoes, nails, and pins, but because he is a man.

— William Ellery Channing

The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.

— William Ellery Channing

All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.

— William Ellery Channing

Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.

— William Ellery Channing

Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.

— William Ellery Channing

Innocent amusements are such as excite moderately, and such as produce a cheerful frame of mind, not boisterous mirth; such as refresh, instead of exhausting, the system; such as recur frequently, rather than continue long; such as send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit; such as we can partake of in the presence and society of respectable friends; such as consist with and are favorable to a grateful piety; such as are chastened by self-respect, and are accompanied with the consciousness that life has a higher end than to be amused.

— William Ellery Channing

To give a generous hope to a man of his own nature, is to enrich him immeasurably.

— William Ellery Channing

Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.

— William Ellery Channing

No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.

— William Ellery Channing

It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.

— William Ellery Channing

No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.

— William Ellery Channing

True love is the parent of humility.

— William Ellery Channing

Error is discipline through which we advance.

— William Ellery Channing

Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.

— William Ellery Channing

Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human mature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.

— William Ellery Channing

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

— William Ellery Channing

Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.

— William Ellery Channing

We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.

— William Ellery Channing

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

— William Ellery Channing

The world is governed by opinion.

— William Ellery Channing

Undoubtedly aman is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.

— William Ellery Channing