The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people’s energy, intellect, and virtues. The savage makes his boast of freedom. But what is its worth? He is, indeed, free from what he calls the yoke of civil institutions. But other and worse chains bind him. The very privation of civil government is in effect a chain; for, by withholding protection from property it virtually shackles the arm of industry, and forbids exertion for the melioration of his lot. Progress, the growth of intelligence and power, is the end and boon of liberty; and, without this, a people may have the name, but want the substance and spirit of freedom.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Freedom
It is the mind which does the work of the world, so that the more there is of mind, the more work will be accomplished.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Mind
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
Men are every day saying and doing, from the power of education, habit, and imitation, what has no root whatever in their serious convictions.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Education
Let our prayers, like the ancient sacrifices, ascend morning and evening. Let our days begin and end with God.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Prayer
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
Do anything innocent rather than give yourself up to reverie. I can speak on this point from experience; for at one period of my life, I was a dreamer and castle-builder. Visions of the dis tant and future took the place of present duty and activity. I spent hours in reverie. The body suffered as much as the mind. The imagination threatened to inflame the passions, and I found, if I meant to be virtuous, I must dismiss my musings. The conflict was a hard one; but I resolved, prayed, resisted, sought refuge in occupation, and at length triumphed.
—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
Topics: Conscience
They that have read about everything are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections. Unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Thinking, Knowledge, Intelligence, Reading
Mistakes and errors are the discipline through which we advance.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Failures, Mistakes
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 whatevercolor, 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
Fiction is no longer a mere amusement; but transcendent genius, accommodating itself to the character of the age, has seized upon this province of literature, and turned fiction from a toy into a mighty engine.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Fiction
He is our friend who loves more than admires us, and would aid us in ous great work.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Friendship
Every day’s experience shows how much more actively education goes on out of the schoolroom, than in it.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Education
We can apply to slavery no worse name than its own. Men have always shrunk instinctively from this state, as the most degraded. No punishment, save death, has been more dreaded; and, to avoid it, death has often been endured. Slavery virtually dissolves the domestic relations. It ruptures the most sacred ties upon earth. It violates home. It lacerates best affections; produces and gives license to cruelty; compels the master systematically to degrade the mind of the slave; and to resist that improvement which is the design and end of the Creator.—Millions may rise up and tell me that the slave suffers little from cruelty. I know too much of human nature, human history, and human passion, to believe them.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Slavery
Men are won, not so much by being blamed, as by being encompassed with love.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Influence
To give a generous hope to a man of his own nature, is to enrich him immeasurably.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Hope
We must not waste life in devising means. It is better to plan less and do more.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Inaction, Getting Going, Procrastination
Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the spring time of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, 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
Topics: Poets, Poetry
The consistency of great error with great virtue, is one of the lessons of universal history.—But error is not made harmless by such associations.—False theories, though held by the greatest and best of men, and though not thoroughly believed, have wrought much evil.
—William Ellery Channing
The world is governed by opinion.
—William Ellery Channing
Conscience, the sense of right, the power of perceiving moral distinctions, the power of discerning between justice and injustice, excellence and baseness, is the highest faculty given us by God, the whole foundation of our responsibility, and our sole capacity for religion. …God, in giving us conscience, has implanted a principle within us which forbids us to prostrate ourselves before mere power, or to offer praise where we do not discover worth.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Morals
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
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
—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
Topics: Reading, Books
No evil is intolerable but a guilty conscience.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Conscience
Most biographies are of little worth.—They are panegyrics, not lives.—The object is, not to let down the hero; and consequently what is most human, most genuine, most characteristic in his history, is excluded.—No department of literature is so false as biography.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Biography
Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: One liners, Faith, Belief, Aspirations
Everything here, but the soul of man, is a passing shadow.—The only enduring substance is within.—When shall we awake to the sublime greatness, the perils, the accountableness, and the glorious destinies of the immortal soul?
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Soul
The ties of family and of country were never intended to circumscribe the soul.—If allowed to become exclusive, engrossing, clannish, so as to shut out the general claims of the human race, the highest end of Providence is frustrated, and home, instead of being the nursery, becomes the grave of the heart.
—William Ellery Channing
Topics: Family
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 Unitarian Minister
- Daniel Webster American Statesman, Lawyer
- James Walker American Clergyman
- Alexander Hamilton American Statesman
- James Madison American Statesman, President
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