“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)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The greatest man is he who chooses the right with invincible resolution, who resists the sorest temptations from within…" by William Ellery Channing?
William Ellery Channing photo
William Ellery Channing 71
United States Unitarian clergyman 1780–1842

Related quotes

Giacomo Casanova photo

“The happiest man is the one who knows how to obtain the greatest sum of happiness without ever failing in the discharge of his duties, and the most unhappy is the man who has adopted a profession in which he finds himself constantly under the sad necessity of foreseeing the future.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

"History of My Life" Chapter 17
Referenced

Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey photo

“He will always see the most beauty whose affections are the warmest and most exercised, whose imagination is the most powerful, and who has most accustomed himself to attend to the objects by which he is surrounded.”

Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773–1850) British politician

Review of Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, in the Edinburgh Review (May 1811)

“The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist. … He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 54.

Meša Selimović photo

“He entered into life with a burden that most of us bear: with the example of great men before his eyes and the desire to follow in their footsteps, but without any knowledge of petty men, who are the only ones we meet.”

Meša Selimović book Death and the Dervish

Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt), Part II, page. 329.
Death and the Dervish (1966)

Washington Irving photo

“Those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"Rip Van Winkle".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

William Lane Craig photo

“The man who claims to have no need of philosophy is the one most apt to be fooled by it.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

A Reasonable Response: Answers to Tough Questions on God, Christianity, and the Bible (2013)

Antonin Artaud photo

“It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

“Praise is the best auxiliary to prayer; and he who most bears in mind what has been done for him by God will be most emboldened to supplicate fresh gifts from above.”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 456.

Jean Paul Sartre photo

“He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god’s secret virtues.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

165
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Simone Weil photo

“Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

La force, c'est ce qui fait de quiconque lui est soumis une chose. Quand elle s'exerce jusqu'au bout, elle fait de l'homme une chose au sens le plus littéral, car elle en fait un cadavre.
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 153
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941)

Related topics