William Ellery Channing
American Unitarian minister and preacher, 1780-1842
22 quotes.
Quotes by William Ellery Channing
- A man in earnest finds means, or if he cannot find, creates them.
- A vigorous purpose makes much out of little, breathes power into weak instruments, disarms difficulties, and even turns them into assistances. Every condition has means of progress, if we have spirit enough to use them.
- Be true to your own highest convictions.
- Books are the true levellers. They give to all who faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.
- Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage.
- Every human being is intended to have a character of his own, to be what no other is, to do what no other can.
- Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
- 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.
- He is to be educated not because he is to make shoes, nails, and pins, but because he is a man.
- He who deliberately adopts a great end, has, by this act, half accomplished it, has scaled the chief barrier to success.
- Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof.
- Men are won, not so much by being blamed, as by being encompassed with love.
- Mistake, error, is the discipline through which we advance.
- Nothing can supply the place of books. They are cheering or soothing companions in solitude, illness, affliction. The wealth of both continents would not compensate for the good they impart.
- Now the noblest influence on earth is that exerted on character; and he who puts forth this, does a great work, no matter how narrow or obscure his sphere.
- One anecdote of a man is worth a volume of biography.
- Others are affected by what I am, and say, and do. And these others have also their sphere of influence. So that a single act of mine may spread in widening circles through a nation or humanity.
- 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.
- The great hope of society is individual character.
- True friends have no solitary joy or sorrow.
- Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.
- We doubt whether a man ever brings his faculties to bear with their whole force on a subject, until he writes upon it.