“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.”
Quote by 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.”
Source: A selection from the works of William E. 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.”
Source: A Sermon on War: delivered before the Convention of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts, May 30, 1816, etc
“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.”
Source: The Works of William E. Channing
“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.”
Source: Self-Culture. An address introductory to the Franklin lectures, delivered at Boston. 1838
“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.”
Source: The Perfect Life: In Twelve Discourses
“A clear thought, a pure affection, a resolute act of a virtuous will, have a dignity of quite another kind, and far higher than accumulations of brick and granite and plaster and stucco, however cunningly put together.”
Source: Self-culture: An address introductory to the Franklin lectures, delivered at Boston, September, 1838
“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.”
Source: Self-Culture. An address introductory to the Franklin lectures, delivered at Boston. 1838
“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.”
Source: Self-Culture. An address introductory to the Franklin lectures, delivered at Boston. 1838
“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.”
Source: The Works of William E. Channing
“They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.”
Source: Jane Austen Collection: illustrated - 6 eBooks and 140+ illustrations