Top 100 William Ellery Channing Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.”

— William Ellery Channing

2. “May your life preach more loudly than your lips.”

— William Ellery Channing

3. “The great hope of society is in individual character.”

— William Ellery Channing

4. “Life is a fragment, a moment between two eternities.”

— William Ellery Channing

5. “Love is the life of the soul. It is the harmony of the universe.”

— William Ellery Channing

6. “It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds...”

— William Ellery Channing

7. “It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind’s dignity.”

— William Ellery Channing

8. “Knowledge is essential to freedom.”

— William Ellery Channing

9. “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

10. “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

11. “The hills are reared, the seas are scooped in vain If learning’s altar vanish from the plain.”

— William Ellery Channing

12. “I am a living member of the great family of all souls; and I cannot improve or suffer myself, without diffusing good or evil around me through an ever-enlarging sphere. I belong to this family. I am bound to it by vital bonds.”

— William Ellery Channing

13. “Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.”

— William Ellery Channing

14. “I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, and which does not cower to human opinion: Which refuses to be the slave or tool of the many or of the few, and guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.”

— William Ellery Channing

15. “We must not waste life in devising means. It is better to plan less and do more.”

— William Ellery Channing

16. “The home is the chief school of human virtues.”

— William Ellery Channing

17. “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

18. “To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. this is my symphony.”

— William Ellery Channing

19. “Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life.”

— William Ellery Channing

20. “Home – the nursery of the Infinite.”

— William Ellery Channing

21. “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from Heaven.”

— William Ellery Channing

22. “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 precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.”

— William Ellery Channing

23. “All that we do outwardly is but the expression and completion of our inward thought. To work effectively, we must think clearly; to act nobly, we must think nobly.”

— William Ellery Channing

24. “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

25. “O God, animate us to cheerfulness! May we have a joyful sense of our blessings, learn to look on the bright circumstances of our lot, and maintain a perpetual contentedness.”

— William Ellery Channing

26. “The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people’s energy, intellect, and virtues.”

— William Ellery Channing

27. “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 life-time is unraveled.”

— William Ellery Channing

28. “Be true to your own highest convictions.”

— William Ellery Channing

29. “Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.”

— William Ellery Channing

30. “Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.”

— William Ellery Channing

31. “To give a generous hope to a man of his own nature, is to enrich him immeasurably.”

— William Ellery Channing

32. “Whatever you may suffer, speak the truth. Be worthy of the entire confidence of your associates. Consider what is right as to what must be done. It is not necessary that you should keep your property, or even your life, but it is necessary that you should hold fast your integrity.”

— William Ellery Channing

33. “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.”

— William Ellery Channing

34. “Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.”

— William Ellery Channing

35. “One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.”

— William Ellery Channing

36. “All virtue lies in individual action, in inward energy, in self determination. There is no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd even toward the best objective.”

— William Ellery Channing

37. “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

38. “I am a living member of the great family of all souls.”

— William Ellery Channing

39. “Mistakes and errors are the discipline through which we advance.”

— William Ellery Channing

40. “The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.”

— William Ellery Channing

41. “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

42. “To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.”

— William Ellery Channing

43. “I laugh, for hope hath a happy place with me; If my boat sinks, ’tis to another sea.”

— William Ellery Channing

44. “God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.”

— William Ellery Channing

45. “What a sublime doctrine it is, that goodness cherished now is eternal life already entered on!”

— William Ellery Channing

46. “The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot.”

— William Ellery Channing

47. “Labor is discovered to be the grand conqueror, enriching and building up nations more surely than the proudest battles.”

— William Ellery Channing

48. “My highway is unfeatured air, My consorts are the sleepless stars, And men my giant arms upbear My arms unstained and free from scars.”

— William Ellery Channing

49. “True love is the parent of humility...”

— William Ellery Channing

50. “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