Life & Wisdom Quote by William Ellery Channing

A brisk command disguised as self-help, Channing's line treats daydreaming not as harmless leisure but as a moral hazard. "Do anything" is deliberately extreme: it makes action the default virtue, casting reverie as a kind of surrender. The verb "give yourself" sharpens the warning. This isn't just about wasting time; it's about losing agency, handing your will over to a private theater where nothing can contradict you, nothing has to be finished, and no one can hold you accountable.

Channing wrote as a leading Unitarian moralist in an early American culture obsessed with character, self-command, and the dignity of purposeful labor. In that context, reverie isn't the romantic poet's sacred zone; it's the soft place where ambition decays and conscience gets blurry. His era was building institutions, markets, and a national identity that prized visible productivity. To "revere" the inner life too much risked becoming socially inert - and spiritually complacent.

The line works because it weaponizes urgency. It's not advising moderation; it's staging a rescue. Any action, even imperfect, breaks the spell of interior fantasy where the self plays hero without resistance. There's also a quiet critique of indulgent introspection: reverie can feel profound while producing nothing but mood. Channing's subtext is that moral life is made in friction - in duties, choices, consequences - not in the narcotic elegance of imagining what we'd do, someday, under perfect conditions.