1780-1842, American Unitarian Minister, Author
All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.
William Ellery Channing – [Enthusiasm]
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
William Ellery Channing – [Difficulties]
Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.
William Ellery Channing – [Reverie]
Error is discipline through which we advance.
William Ellery Channing – [Mistakes]
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 – [Responsibility]
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 – [Character]
Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
William Ellery Channing – [Books and Reading]
Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
William Ellery Channing – [Faith]
Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.
William Ellery Channing – [Perfection]
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 – [Books and Reading]
He is to be educated not because he's to make shoes, nails, and pins, but because he is a man.
William Ellery Channing – [Education]
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 – [Fun]
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 – [Books and Reading]
It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.
William Ellery Channing – [Conscience]
It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.
William Ellery Channing – [Knowledge]
Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.
William Ellery Channing – [Amiability]
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 – [Labor]
No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.
William Ellery Channing – [Individuality]
Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.
William Ellery Channing – [Experience]
One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.
William Ellery Channing – [Speakers and Speaking]