Top 100 William Ellery Channing Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A man in earnest finds means or, if he cannot find, creates them.”

— William Ellery Channing

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

— William Ellery Channing

53. “Life has a higher end, than to be amused.”

— William Ellery Channing

54. “Other blessings may be taken away, but if we have acquired a good friend by goodness, we have a blessing which improves in value when others fail.”

— William Ellery Channing

55. “How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.”

— William Ellery Channing

56. “Our affections are our life. We live by them; they supply our warmth.”

— William Ellery Channing

57. “Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.”

— William Ellery Channing

58. “Of all the discoveries which men need to make, the most important, at the present moment, is that of the self-forming power treasured up in themselves. They little suspect its extent, as little as the savage apprehends the energy which the mind is created to exert on the material world.”

— William Ellery Channing

59. “An earnest purpose finds time, or makes it. It seizes on spare moments, and turns fragments to golden account.”

— William Ellery Channing

60. “The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.”

— William Ellery Channing

61. “No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.”

— William Ellery Channing

62. “Let us aspire towards this living confidence, that it is the will of God to unfold and exalt without end the spirit that entrusts itself to Him in well-doing as to a faithful Creator.”

— William Ellery Channing

63. “Real greatness has nothing to do with a man’s sphere. It does not lie in the magnitude of his outward agency, in the extent of the effects which he produces. The greatest men may do comparatively little.”

— William Ellery Channing

64. “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

65. “A clear thought, a pure affection, a resolute act of a virtuous will, have a dignity of quite another kind, and far higher than accumulations of brick and granite and plaster and stucco, however cunningly put together.”

— William Ellery Channing

66. “Another powerful principle of our nature, which is the spring of war, is the passion for superiority, for triumph, for power. The human mind is aspiring, impatient of inferiority, and eager for preeminence and control.”

— William Ellery Channing

67. “The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.”

— William Ellery Channing

68. “Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.”

— William Ellery Channing

69. “Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.”

— William Ellery Channing

70. “Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof.”

— William Ellery Channing

71. “Progress, the growth of 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

72. “We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers.”

— William Ellery Channing

73. “The miracles of Christ were studiously performed in the most unostentatious way. He seemed anxious to veil His majesty under the love with which they were wrought.”

— William Ellery Channing

74. “No punishment is so terrible as prosperous guilt.”

— William Ellery Channing

75. “God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.”

— William Ellery Channing

76. “War will never yield but to the principles of universal justice and love, and these have no sure root but in the religion of Jesus Christ.”

— William Ellery Channing

77. “War is to be ranked among the most dreadful calamities which fall on a guilty world; and, what deserves consideration, it tends to multiply and perpetuate itself without end. It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions, from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence.”

— William Ellery Channing

78. “Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul, that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love, and this may be found in the humblest condition of life.”

— William Ellery Channing

79. “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 of his mind, and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought.”

— William Ellery Channing

80. “In the long run, truth is aided by nothing so much as by opposition.”

— William Ellery Channing

81. “A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.”

— William Ellery Channing

82. “Perhaps in our presence, the most heroic deed on earth is done in some silent spirit, the loftiest purpose cherished, the most generous sacrifice made, and we do not suspect it. I believe this greatness to be most common among the multitude, whose names are never heard.”

— William Ellery Channing

83. “Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.”

— William Ellery Channing

84. “There is but a very minute portion of the creation which we can turn into food and clothes, or gratification for the body; but the whole creation may be used to minister to the sense of beauty.”

— William Ellery Channing

85. “One of the tremendous evils of the world, is the monstrous accumulation of power in a few hands.”

— William Ellery Channing

86. “The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.”

— William Ellery Channing

87. “But the ground of a man’s culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nail, or pins.”

— William Ellery Channing

88. “The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first offends, which wins its way by degrees, which the many hate and would rejoice to crush.”

— William Ellery Channing

89. “Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.”

— William Ellery Channing

90. “In general, we do well to let an opponent’s motives alone. We are seldom just to them. Our own motives on such occasions are often worse than those we assail.”

— William Ellery Channing

91. “The reveries of youth, in which so much energy is wasted, are the yearnings of a Spirit made for what it has not found but must forever seek as an Ideal.”

— William Ellery Channing

92. “Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.”

— William Ellery Channing

93. “All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.”

— William Ellery Channing

94. “It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions, from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence.”

— William Ellery Channing

95. “Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power.”

— William Ellery Channing

96. “We never know a greater character unless there is in ourselves something congenial to it.”

— William Ellery Channing

97. “Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.”

— William Ellery Channing

98. “Religion is faith in an infinite Creator, who delights in and enjoins that rectitude which conscience commands us to seek. This conviction gives a Divine sanction to duty.”

— William Ellery Channing

99. “To me it seems that the soul, in all its higher actions, in original thought, in the creations of genius, in the soarings of imagination, in its love of beauty and grandeur, in its aspirations after a pure and unknown joy, and especially in disinterestedness, in the spirit of self-sacrifice, and in enlightened devotion, has a character of infinity.”

— William Ellery Channing

100. “It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.”

— William Ellery Channing