William Ellery Channing's Quotes

Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.

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

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.

He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a life-time is unraveled.

No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.

The great hope of society is in individual character.

The home is the chief school of human virtues.

All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.

Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.

Error is discipline through which we advance.

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

While short sellers probably will never be popular on Wall Street, they often are the ones wearing the white hats when it comes to looking for and identifying the bad guys!

Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses. And there's no bigger credit excess than in China.

It's very difficult in the technology space when you have been leapfrogged to prosper again.

People who lose money always need someone to blame.

The investment we're all looking for is actually saving labor... Look at what the internet is doing to retail.

And so it can be very much in the interest of bank A to sell-short bank B shares, or buy CDSes on bank B, because they have exposure to bank B. It's the responsible thing to do as a fiduciary, and yet if everyone does it at the same time, it's destabilizing because everyone is selling.

Derivatives in and of themselves are not evil. There's nothing evil about how they're traded, how they're accounted for, and how they're financed, like any other financial instrument, if done properly.

Dubai was a property bubble. Plain and simple. Go to Dubai and see what happened. It was... what I call it the 'Edifice complex' - it's just, we can grow by putting up lots and lots of buildings and trying to attract people to come here, stay here, and put up offices here and sooner or later, you put up too many.

Healthcare is growing now at about 10 per cent per annum in the U.S. top line, versus 3 per cent for the economy. As someone with a sharp pencil and an eye for this kind of thing, this can't last.

I'll always understand the Schadenfreude aspect to short-selling. I get that no one will always like it. I'm also convinced to the deepest part of my bones that short-selling plays the role of real-time financial watchdog. It's one of the few checks and balances in the market.

I've learned there's a big difference between a long-focused value investor and a good short-seller. That difference is psychological and I think it falls into the realm of behavioral finance.

If you're a short-seller, that's a cacophony of negative reinforcement. You're basically told that you're wrong in every way imaginable every day. It takes a certain type of individual to drown that noise and negative reinforcement out and to remind oneself that their work is accurate and what they're hearing is not.

In China, remember, the the banks are arms of state policy. They loan because the local party official or regional party official tells them we need a new stadium. They are instruments of state policy.

Increasingly, the real estate developers can't get bank loans for their project financing in China. They're now going into the Hong Kong market to raise money in the bond market at very, very high rates, as high as 15, 20 percent.

It's almost sickening now that the regulators 'on the beat' while the biggest credit collapse in modern financial history unfolded are now patting themselves on the back for their 'brave' stance on short-selling!

Our concerns about what we saw in Australia: an economy clearly tied to China has hitched its wagon to the tail of the tiger. In terms of the general complacency, what we heard over and over from investors and clients and potential clients is, 'yes, yes, there are some excesses, but the government will figure out a way.'

So you know, everyone points out Greece's default record, but the history of a lot of sovereign nations is not a good one when it comes to lending them money.

The Chinese banking system is built on quicksand and that's the one thing a lot of people don't realize. Everybody seems to think it is a free and clear open checkbook. It's not. The banking system in China is extremely fragile.

The interesting thing about the China story, getting back to the macro and micro, and as dire as I think the macro story is - due to bad credit and credit extension that makes Greece and Spain and the U.S. look like child's play - when you get to the micro of individual companies, they look even worse.

The Macau casinos have a wonderful business, it's taking in money from Chinese businessmen elsewhere who send it through junky companies to casinos to gamble. The growth continues and they have basically western managers and western accounting, so we trust the numbers a little bit more.

The marginal people on the trading desks, there's no skill set. If they don't trade derivatives, I don't know what they can do. The next stop is driving a cab.

The U.S. healthcare system is probably the most interesting large group of companies that are heading for major problems that we've seen in a long, long time.

There's almost 70 billion in square feet under construction in high rises in commercial, residential and light manufacturing. And we estimate about 30 billion square feet, and that's with a 'B,' is commercial, that we would just consider office space. To put that in perspective, that's a 5x5-foot cubicle for every man, woman and child in China.

What American people and what the markets want is a fair and level playing-field, where the rules are clearly elucidated, where the referees are competent, and where we know that the game is not rigged.

What people don't realize is that China papered over its last two credit bubbles, those in 1999 and 2004. The banks were never bailed out - they just exchanged their bad loans for questionable bonds from quasi-state organizations.

What we define as a bubble is any kind of debt-fueled asset inflation where the cash flow generated by the asset itself - a rental property, office building, condo - does not cover the debt incurred to buy the asset. So you depend on a greater fool, if you will, to come in and buy at a higher price.

If you don't enter the tiger's den, how can you catch the tiger's cub?

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.

The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

For the last few years I've tried to force myself to write at least one page every day, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually pretty hard to manage. Because I'm not allowed to do a make-up day. I can't do two pages the next day. The punishment for not completing my page is that I have to eat a vegetarian meal the next day.

I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.

I have to admit that 'Psychology Today' was one of the first magazines I started reading, back when I was 13 or 14, because I was the kind of kid that was curious about the mysterious human mind - I hoped to learn about telekenisis, multiple personalities, psychosis, and various other cool and terrible things that happened inside people's heads.

I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once - I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.

I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.

I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.

People write fiction in their minds all the time - every time we read a 'human interest' news story, or a true crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we're trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become.

The thing that grounds you, and the thing that really gives you a sense of wholeness, is your family, friends and your community. Those are the things that can mirror back to you what you're experiencing, and can affirm to you that the stories you are telling are true.

Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.

Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.

At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy.

Skepticism has never founded empires, established principals, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.

Not in achievement, but in endurance, of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite.

A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.

An aged Christian, with the snow of time upon his head, may remind us that those points of earth are whitest which are nearest to heaven.

Through every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.

Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth.

No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.

The essence of justice is mercy.

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair.

Neutral men are the devil's allies.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.

Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies.

Profaneness is a brutal vice. He who indulges in it is no gentleman.

The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart dances under coarse wool.

The creed of a true saint is to make the best of life, and to make the most of it.

The downright fanatic is nearer to the heart of things than the cool and slippery disputant.

This is the essential evil of vice, that it debases man.

Tribulation will not hurt you, unless as it too often does; it hardens you and makes you sour, narrow and skeptical.