Quotes from Thomas Jefferson

Don't spend your money till you have it.

We do not mean to count or weigh our contributions by any standard other than that of our abilities.

Money, not morality, constitutes the principle of commercial nations.

I deny the power of the general government to making paper money, or anything else a legal tender.

The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.

Whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.

Drawing ... is an innocent & engaging amusement, often useful, and a qualification not to be neglected in one who is to become a mother & an instructor.

Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Exercise and application produce order in our affairs, health of body, cheerfulness of mind, and these make us precious to our friends

We should talk over the lessons of the day, or lose them in Music, Chess, or the merriments of our family companions.

The sun - my almighty physician.

Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind.

A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.

How sublime to look down on the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!

The sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art. To give praise where it is not due, might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature.

The Earth is given as a common for men to labor and live in.

Our ancestors ... possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them.

There are other places at which ... the laws have said there shall be towns; but Nature has said there shall not, and they remain unworthy of enumeration.

Error is to be pitied and pardoned: it is the weakness of human nature. But vice is a foul blemish, not pardonable in any character.

Never throw off the best affections of nature in the moment when they become most precious to their object; nor fear to extend you hand to save another, lest you should sink yourself.