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.”

“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.”

“Life has a higher end, than to be amused.”

“The best books for a man are not always those which the wise recommend, but often those which meet the peculiar wants, the natural thirst of his mind, and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought.”

“Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.”

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

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

“It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.”

“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.”

“The great hope of society is in individual character.”

“Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.”

“The home is the chief school of human virtues.”

“God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.”

“How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.”

“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.”

“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.”