Life & Wisdom Quote by William Ellery Channing

Channing’s line flatters the reader, then quietly disciplines him. “Every man” sounds democratic, almost sentimental, but the verb choice is the tell: a person isn’t a poem to be admired; he’s a “volume” to be read. That metaphor makes character legible and, by implication, accountable. In the early 19th-century world Channing helped shape - American Unitarianism, moral reform, the belief that a self can be educated into something better - people are not fixed types. They are texts in progress: layered, revisable, interpretable.

The hook is the conditional clause: “if you know how.” Channing isn’t just praising human depth; he’s sorting audiences. There are those who glance and those who read. The line carries an ethical subtext: shallow judgment is a kind of illiteracy. To “read” someone well requires attention, patience, and humility, the same virtues Channing preached against the era’s quick certainties and public cruelties. It also assumes the world is full of meaning waiting to be decoded, not merely consumed.

There’s a sly inversion here, too. Books are usually objects; people are usually subjects. By turning “every man” into a “volume,” Channing asks us to treat strangers with the seriousness we reserve for printed authority, while also hinting that the canon is walking around on the street. The intent isn’t to romanticize individuality; it’s to demand a higher standard of perception - a moral literacy equal to the complexity of other human beings.