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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
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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
Person
Smile
Eager
Made
Reach
Impatient
Every
Ignorance
Savages
Cutting
Cuts
Tree
Fierce
Pleasure
Patience
Blunder
Order
Pursuit
Blunders
Persons
Fruit
Savage
More quotes by William Ellery Channing
The sin that now rises to memory as your bosom sin, let this first of all be withstood and mastered. Oppose it instantly by a detestation of it, by a firm will to conquer it, by reflection, by reason, and by prayer.
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
Another powerful principle of our nature, which is the spring of war, is the passion for superiority, for triumph, for power. The human mind is aspiring, impatient of inferiority, and eager for preeminence and control.
William Ellery Channing
We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers.
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
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
Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
William Ellery Channing
The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.
William Ellery Channing
I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, and which does not cower to human opinion: Which refuses to be the slave or tool of the many or of the few, and guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.
William Ellery Channing
The home is the chief school of human virtues.
William Ellery Channing
How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.
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
The great hope of society is in individual character
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
To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.
William Ellery Channing
The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.
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
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
William Ellery Channing
God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.
William Ellery Channing
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.
William Ellery Channing
