148 Quotes by William Ellery Channing

Knowledge is essential to freedom.

No punishment is so terrible as prosperous guilt.

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.

Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.

War will never yield but to the principles of universal justice and love, and these have no sure root but in the religion of Jesus Christ.

There is but a very minute portion of the creation which we can turn into food and clothes, or gratification for the body; but the whole creation may be used to minister to the sense of beauty.

Religion is faith in an infinite Creator, who delights in and enjoins that rectitude which conscience commands us to seek. This conviction gives a Divine sanction to duty.

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.

God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.