Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.
William Ellery Channing
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William Ellery Channing
Age: 62 †
Born: 1780
Born: April 7
Died: 1842
Died: October 2
Pastor
Preacher
Theologian
Newport
Rhode Island
Reverend William Ellery Channing
Government
Giving
Confer
Work
Patriotic
Men
Libertarian
Office
Happiness
Opportunity
Give
More quotes by William Ellery Channing
The domestic relations precede, and in our present existence are worth more than all our other social ties. They give the first throb to the heart, and unseal the deep fountains of its love. Home is the chief school of human virtue. Its responsibilities, joys, sorrows, smiles, tears, hopes, and solicitudes form the chief interest of human life.
William Ellery Channing
No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.
William Ellery Channing
Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.
William Ellery Channing
Progress, the growth of power, is the end and boon of liberty and, without this, a people may have the name, but want the substance and spirit of freedom.
William Ellery Channing
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
William Ellery Channing
Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof.
William Ellery Channing
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.
William Ellery Channing
We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.
William Ellery Channing
Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
William Ellery Channing
Let us aspire towards this living confidence, that it is the will of God to unfold and exalt without end the spirit that entrusts itself to Him in well-doing as to a faithful Creator.
William Ellery Channing
The great hope of society is in individual character
William Ellery Channing
An earnest purpose finds time, or makes it. It seizes on spare moments, and turns fragments to golden account.
William Ellery Channing
Knowledge is essential to freedom.
William Ellery Channing
Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.
William Ellery Channing
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.
William Ellery Channing
Real greatness has nothing to do with a man’s sphere. It does not lie in the magnitude of his outward agency, in the extent of the effects which he produces. The greatest men may do comparatively little.
William Ellery Channing
Did any man at his death ever regret his conflicts with himself, his victories over appetite, his scorn of impure pleasure, or his sufferings for righteousness' sake?
William Ellery Channing
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.
William Ellery Channing
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.
William Ellery Channing
It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.
William Ellery Channing