William Ellery Channing Quotes

American Unitarian clergyman (1780–1842)

William Ellery Channing (April 7 1780 – October 2 1842) was the foremost Unitarian theologian and preacher in the United States in the early nineteenth century.

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Alternative Names: Reverend William Ellery Channing • William E. Channing • William Channing

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

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

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.

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.

Peace is the fairest form of happiness.

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. 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. 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.

Between, I stand, a creature taught
To stand between two silent floors.

To educate a child perfectly requires profounder thought, greater wisdom, than to govern a state.