William Ellery Channing

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The home is the chief school of human virtues.

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.

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