William Ellery Channing

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.

No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.

I laugh, for hope hath a happy place with me; If my boat sinks, 'tis to another sea.

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.

Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.

He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a life-time is unraveled.

Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.

Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.

It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

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.

Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul, that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love, and this may be found in the humblest condition of life.

The reveries of youth, in which so much energy is wasted, are the yearnings of a Spirit made for what it has not found but must forever seek as an Ideal.

Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.

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.