William Ellery Channing Quotes
-
An earnest purpose finds time, or makes it. It seizes on spare moments, and turns fragments to golden account.
-
To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.
-
Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power.
-
Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.
-
Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.
-
Labor is discovered to be the grand conqueror, enriching and building up nations more surely than the proudest battles.
-
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.
-
Home - the nursery of the Infinite.
-
The fewer the voices on the side of truth, the more distinct and strong must be your own.
-
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.
-
It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions , from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.
-
What a sublime doctrine it is, that goodness cherished now is eternal life already entered on!
-
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.
-
To be prosperous is not to be superior, and should form no barrier between men. Wealth out not to secure the prosperous the slightest consideration. The only distinctions which should be recognized are those of the soul, of strong principle, of incorruptible integrity, of usefulness, of cultivated intellect, of fidelity in seeking the truth.
-
God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.
-
To give a generous hope to a man of his own nature, is to enrich him immeasurably.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.