Religion, if it be true, is central truth; and all knowledge which is not gathered round it, and quickened and illuminated by it, is hardly worthy the name.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Religion
Precept is instruction written in the sand.—The tide flows over it, and the record is gone.—Example is graven on the rock, and the lesson is not soon lost.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Example
An earnest purpose finds time, or makes it. It seizes on spare moments, and turns fragments to golden account.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Value of Time, Time Management
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
Topics: Pleasure, Smile
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
—William Ellery Channing
To be prosperous is not to be superior, and should form no barrier between men. Wealth out not to secure the prosperous the slightest consideration. The only distinctions which should be recognized are those of the soul, of strong principle, of incorruptible integrity, of usefulness, of cultivated intellect, of fidelity in seeking the truth.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Honesty, Wealth
Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Encouragement
Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Books
Worship God by reverencing the human soul as God’s chosen sanctuary. Revere it in yourselves, revere it in others, and labor to carry it forward. …Go forth to respect the rights, and seek the true, enduring welfare of all within your influence. Carry with you the conviction that to trample on a human being, of whatever color, clime, rank, condition, is to trample on God’s child. …Go forth to do good with every power which God bestows, to make every place you enter happier by your presence, to espouse all human interests, to throw your whole weight into the scale of human freedom and improvement, to withstand all wrong, to uphold all right, and especially to give light, life, strength to the immortal soul.
—William Ellery Channing
The chief evil of war is more evil. War is the concentration of all human crimes. Here is its distinguishing, accursed brand. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, perfidy, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew man, it would do little. It turns man into a beast of prey.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: War
The great hope of society is in individual character.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Character
It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Conscience
A beautiful literature springs from the depth and fullness of intellectual and moral life, from an energy of thought and feeling, to which nothing, as we believe, ministers so largely as enlightened religion.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Literature
A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Sanity
Even in evil, that dark cloud that hangs over creation, we discern rays of light and hope, and gradually come to see, in suffering and temptation, proofs and instruments of the sublimest purposes of wisdom and love.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Evils
The home is the chief school of human virtues.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Virtue
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
Topics: Reading, Books
The sin that now rises to your memory as your bosom sin, let this be first of all withstood and mastered.—Oppose it instantly by a detestation of it, by a firm will to conquer it, by reflection, by reason, by prayer.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Sin
All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Enthusiasm
Secret study, silent thought, is, after all, the mightiest agent in human affairs.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Thought
Contempt of all outward things that come in competition with duty fulfils the ideal of human greatness.—It is sanctioned by conscience, that universal and eternal lawgiver, whose chief principle is, that everything must be yielded up for right.
—William Ellery Channing
Here lies the evil of slavery: Its whips, imprisonments, and even the horrors of the middle passage, are not to be named, in comparison with the extinction of the proper consciousness of a human being—with the degradation of a man into a brute.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Slavery
Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Perfection
Whatever expands the affections, or enlarges the sphere of our sympathies—whatever makes us feel our relation to the universe and all that it inherits in time and in eternity, and to the great and beneficent cause of all, must unquestionably refine our nature, and elevate us in the scale of being.
—William Ellery Channing
The more discussion the better, if passion and personality be eschewed.—Discussion, even if stormy, often winnows truth from error—a good never to be expected in an uninquiring age.
—William Ellery Channing
We never know a greater character unless there is in ourselves something congenial to it.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Appreciation
The incongruity of the Bible with the age of its birth; its freedom from earthly mixtures; its original, unborrowed, solitary greatness; the suddenness with which it broke forth amidst the general gloom; these, to me, are strong indications of its Divine descent: I cannot reconcile them with a human origin.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Bible
No human being, man or woman, can act up to a sublime standard without giving offence.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Duty
All that a man does outwardly is but the expression and completion of his inward thought. To work effectually, he must think clearly; to act nobly, he must think nobly. Intellectual force is a principal element of the soul’s life, and should be proposed by every man as the principal end of his being.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Thought, War, Think, Positive Attitudes, Work, Optimism, Act
The world is governed by opinion.
—William Ellery Channing
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Maria Mitchell American Astronomer
- Edward Everett Hale American Unitarian Clergyman
- William Laurence Sullivan American Unitarian Clergyman
- Joseph Priestley English Clergyman, Scientist
- George Washington Burnap American Unitarian Clergyman
- Thomas Starr King American Clergyman
- Daniel Webster American Statesman, Lawyer
- James Walker American Clergyman
- Alexander Hamilton American Statesman
- James Madison American Statesman, President
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