Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
- Thomas Jefferson
(also attributed to Benjamin Franklin and Lord Chesterfield)
Related topics: Wisdom
The glow of one warm thought
is to me worth more than money.
- Thomas Jefferson
Only aim to do your duty,
and mankind will give you credit where you fail.
- Thomas Jefferson
In matters of style, swim with the current;
in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
- Thomas Jefferson
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Don't talk about what you have done
or what you are going to do.
- Thomas Jefferson
Whenever you do a thing,
act as if all the world were watching.
- Thomas Jefferson
Truth is certainly a branch of morality
and a very important one to society.
- Thomas Jefferson
Nothing can stop the man with the right
mental attitude from achieving his goal;
nothing on earth can help the man
with the wrong mental attitude.
- Thomas Jefferson
Power is not alluring to pure minds.
- Thomas Jefferson
We are not afraid to follow truth
wherever it may lead,
nor to tolerate any error
so long as reason is left free to combat it.
- Thomas Jefferson
Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life
in which chance has placed us,
but is always the result of a good conscience,
good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.
- Thomas Jefferson
I believe that every human mind feels pleasure
in doing good to another.
- Thomas Jefferson
The happiest moments my heart knows are those in which
it is pouring forth its affections to a few esteemed characters.
- Thomas Jefferson
When angry, count to ten before you speak.
If very angry, count to one hundred.
- Thomas Jefferson
An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.
- Thomas Jefferson
He who knows best knows how little he knows.
- Thomas Jefferson
How much pain they have cost us,
the evils which have never happened.
- Thomas Jefferson
We never repent of having eaten too little.
- Thomas Jefferson
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth
than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
- Thomas Jefferson
I find that the harder I work,
the more luck I seem to have.
- Thomas Jefferson
Do you want to know who you are?
Don't ask. Act!
Action will delineate and define you.
- Thomas Jefferson
It is always better to have no ideas than false ones;
to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.
- Thomas Jefferson
I never considered a difference of opinion
in politics, in religion, in philosophy,
as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
- Thomas Jefferson
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another
as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
- Thomas Jefferson
I am a great believer in luck
and I find that the harder
I work the more I have of it.
- Thomas Jefferson
Determine never to be idle.
No person will have occasion to complain
of the want of time who never loses any.
It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
- Thomas Jefferson
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations;
entangling alliances with none.
- Thomas Jefferson
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people ...
They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
- Thomas Jefferson
It is in our lives and not our words
that our religion must be read.
- Thomas Jefferson
Fix reason firmly in her seat,
and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God;
because, if there be one,
he must more approve of the homage of reason,
than that of blindfolded fear.
- Thomas Jefferson
It is neither wealth nor splendor;
but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.
- Thomas Jefferson
The good opinion of mankind,
like the lever of Archimedes,
with the given fulcrum, moves the world.
- Thomas Jefferson
Speeches that are measured by the hour
will die with the hour.
- Thomas Jefferson
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say
there are twenty gods or no God.
- Thomas Jefferson
Walking is the best possible exercise.
Habituate yourself to walk very fast.
- Thomas Jefferson
Wisdom I know is social.
She seeks her fellows.
But Beauty is jealous,
and illy bears the presence of a rival.
- Thomas Jefferson
I find that he is happiest
of whom the world says least, good or bad.
- Thomas Jefferson
The moment a person forms a theory,
his imagination sees in every object
only the traits which favor that theory.
- Thomas Jefferson
Happiness is not being pained in body, or troubled in mind.
- Thomas Jefferson
No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,
and no culture comparable to that of the garden.
- Thomas Jefferson
The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.
- Thomas Jefferson
Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect,
but of all human contemplations,
the most abhorrent is body without mind.
- Thomas Jefferson
It takes time to persuade men to do even
what is for their own good.
- Thomas Jefferson
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold
is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
- Thomas Jefferson
I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.
- Thomas Jefferson
Dependence begets subservience and venality,
suffocates the germ of virtue,
and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
- Thomas Jefferson
It is more dangerous that even
a guilty person should be punished
without the forms of law
than that he should escape.
- Thomas Jefferson
Force is the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.
- Thomas Jefferson
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government
results from too much government.
- Thomas Jefferson
Be polite to all, but intimate with few.
- Thomas Jefferson
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time
with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
- Thomas Jefferson
Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone
I love not to mix with it.
- Thomas Jefferson
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted
with the government of himself.
Can he, then be trusted with the government of others?
Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him?
Let history answer this question.
- Thomas Jefferson
We may consider each generation as a distinct nation,
with a right, by the will of its majority,
to bind themselves, but none to
bind the succeeding generation,
more than the inhabitants of another country.
- Thomas Jefferson
I sincerely believe that banking establishments
are more dangerous than standing armies,
and that the principle of spending money
to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding,
is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
- Thomas Jefferson
The man who reads nothing at all
is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
- Thomas Jefferson
I have sworn upon the altar of God,
eternal hostility against every form of tyranny
over the mind of man.
- Thomas Jefferson
A Bill of Rights is what the people are
entitled to against every government,
and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.
- Thomas Jefferson
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices,
a rottenness begins in his conduct.
- Thomas Jefferson
Errors of opinion may be tolerated
where reason is left free to combat it.
- Thomas Jefferson
Taste cannot be controlled by law.
- Thomas Jefferson
I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America,
the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry,
and of criminal inquiry too.
- Thomas Jefferson
No government ought to be without censors;
and where the press is free no one ever will.
- Thomas Jefferson
Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.
The several sects perform the office of a Censor -
over each other.
- Thomas Jefferson
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism
to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
I predict future happiness for Americans
if they can prevent the government
from wasting the labors of the people
under the pretense of taking care of them.
- Thomas Jefferson
No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying
as to put the right man in the right place.
- Thomas Jefferson
For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so,
a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.
- Thomas Jefferson
An association of men who will not quarrel with one another
is a thing which has never yet existed,
from the greatest confederacy of nations
down to a town meeting or a vestry.
- Thomas Jefferson
Experience demands that man is
the only animal which devours his own kind,
for I can apply no milder term to
the general prey of the rich on the poor.
- Thomas Jefferson
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- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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