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William Ellery Channing Quotes
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William Ellery Channing was the foremost Unitarian preacher in the United States in the early nineteenth century and, along with Andrews Norton , one of Unitarianism's leading theologians. Channing was known for his articulate and impassioned sermons and public speeches, and as a prominent thinker in the liberal theology of the day. His religion and thought were among the chief influences on the New England Transcendentalists although he never countenanced their views, which he saw as extreme. He espoused, especially in his "Baltimore Sermon" of May 5, 1819, given at the ordination of the theologian and educator Jared Sparks as the first minister of the newly organized First Independent Church of Baltimore, the principles and tenets of the developing philosophy and theology of Unitarianism, leading to the organization in 1825 of the first Unitarian denomination in America and the later developments and mergers between Unitarians and Universalists, resulting finally in the Unitarian Universalist Association of America in 1961. Wikipedia  

✵ 7. April 1780 – 2. October 1842
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William Ellery Channing: 71   quotes 2   likes

William Ellery Channing Quotes

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

William Ellery Channing

Emancipation (1840)

“Contempt of all outward things, which come in competition with duty, fulfills the ideal of human greatness. This conviction, that readiness to sacrifice life's highest material good and life itself, is essential to the elevation of human nature, is no illusion of ardent youth, nor outburst of blind enthusiasm. It does not yield to growing wisdom. It is confirmed by all experience. It is sanctioned by conscience — that universal and eternal lawgiver whose chief dictate is, that every thing must be yielded up for the right.”

William Ellery Channing

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 533.

Life , Wisdom , Youth , Nature

“I have chosen for the subject of this lecture Self-culture, or the care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting of his nature.”

William Ellery Channing

Self-Culture (1838)

Nature , Perfection

“The greatest man is he who chooses the right with invincible resolution, who resists the sorest temptations from within and without, who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully, who is calmest in storms, and most fearless under menace and frowns, whose reliance on truth, on virtue, on God, is most unfaltering; and is this a greatness which is apt to make a show, or which is most likely to abound in conspicuous station?”

William Ellery Channing

Self-Culture (1838)

God , Truth

“Books are the true levelers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, … I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.”

William Ellery Channing

Self-Culture (1838)

Books , Time

“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.”

William Ellery Channing

Source: "The Father's Love for Persons" https://www.google.com/books/edition/Select_Discourses_and_Essays/loYfAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22I+am+a+living+member+of+the+great+Family+of+All+Souls%22&pg=PA343&printsec=frontcover, in Selected Discourses and Essays from the works of William Ellery Channing, DD (1895)

Family , Soul , Suffering , Evil