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Character
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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
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Conscience
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It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.
-William Ellery Channing
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Difficulty
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Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
-William Ellery Channing
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Dreams
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Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.
-William Ellery Channing
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Education
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He is to be educated not because he's to make shoes, nails, and pins, but because he is a man.
-William Ellery Channing
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Enemy, Enemies
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The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.
-William Ellery Channing
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Enthusiasm
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All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.
-William Ellery Channing
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Experience
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Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.
-William Ellery Channing
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Faith
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Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
-William Ellery Channing
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Friends
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Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.
-William Ellery Channing
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Hope
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To give a generous hope to a man of his own nature, is to enrich him immeasurably.
-William Ellery Channing
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Individuality
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No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.
-William Ellery Channing
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Knowledge
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It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.
-William Ellery Channing
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Labor
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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
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Learning
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It has often been observed, that those who have the most time at their disposal profit by it the least. A single hour a day, steadily given to the study of some interesting subject, brings unexpected accumulations of knowledge.
-William Ellery Channing
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Love
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True love is the parent of humility.
-William Ellery Channing
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Mistakes
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Error is discipline through which we advance.
-William Ellery Channing
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Morals
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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, The Moral Argument Against Calvinism,(1809) from The Works of William E. Channing, D.D. (Boston:American Unitarian Association, 1898), quoted in William Ellery Channing Speaks, Mark Harris, ed.(Boston:UUA, 1985), p. 5.
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Perfection
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Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.
-William Ellery Channing
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Pleasure
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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
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Poetry
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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
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Progress
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Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.
-William Ellery Channing
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Reading
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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
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Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
-William Ellery Channing
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It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the communion with superior minds. In the best books, authors talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books.
-William Ellery Channing
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Books by and about William Ellery Channing