William Ellery Channing Quotes

56 quotes in 719 categories

• Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
• 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…
• Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.
• Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
• No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.
• Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
• Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.
• The best books for a man are not always those which the wise recommend, but often those which meet the peculiar wants, the natural thirst…
• The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.
• 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…
• God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.
• 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…
• Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.
• It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most…
• It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.
• The home is the chief school of human virtues.
• He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a…
• It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.
• Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.
• One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

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