“It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which give happiness.”
―
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
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude
from achieving his goal.
Nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong attitude.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Gospels] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor... We find in the writings of his biographers matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications... That sect [Jews] had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust... Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law... That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore.
―
Thomas Jefferson
“All that is necessary for a student is access to a library.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened. --”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“We confide in our strength, without boasting of it, we respect that of others, without fearing it.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
“The policy of the American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.”
―
Thomas Jefferson
