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People should be guarded against temptation to unlawful pleasures by furnishing them the means of innocent ones. In every community there must be pleasures, relaxations and means of agreeable excitement; and if innocent are not furnished, resort will be had to criminal. Man was made to enjoy as well as labor, and the state of society should be adapted to this principle of human nature.

— William Ellery Channing Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

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More quotes by William Ellery Channing

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

Religious instruction should aim chiefly to turn men’s aspirations and efforts to that perfection of the soul, which constitutes it a bright image of God.

Likeness to God (1828)

Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power.

We must watch over pious impressions, and cultivate them, or they will never become vigorous and enduring.

We doubt whether a man ever brings his faculties to bear with their whole force on a subject, until he writes upon it.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Ellery Channing (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.