Thomas Jefferson Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. … the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. Memoirs, Correspondence And Private Papers Of Ed. By T.J. Randolph

2. All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world. Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters

3. Every generation needs a new revolution.

4. Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.

5. I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

6. I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.

7. I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led.

8. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

9. No government ought to be without censors: and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operation of attack and defence. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth either in religion, law, or politics. I think it as honorable to the government neither to know, nor notice, it’s sycophants or censors, as it would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter. The Papers of Vol. 24: 1 June-31 December 1792

10. No people who are ignorant can be truly free.

11. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. Memoirs, Correspondence And Private Papers Of Ed. By T.J. Randolph

12. Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence.

13. The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. . . . [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.(A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.) Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters

14. A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.

15. But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses

16. 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. Letters of Thomas Jefferson

17. Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. Letters of Thomas Jefferson

18. Freedom, the first-born of science. Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters

19. I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, "I feel: therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them "matter". I feel them changing place. This gives me "motion". Where there is an absence of matter, I call it "void", or "nothing", or "immaterial space". On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.

20. It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.

21. May it [American independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately... These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.[Letter to Roger C. Weightman on the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, 24 June 1826. This was Jefferson's last letter] Letters of Thomas Jefferson

22. Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions. Letters of Thomas Jefferson

23. Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry... Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

24. Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters

25. Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race. Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters

26. The attempt of Lavoisier to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of science by a jargon, from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us. Letters of Thomas Jefferson

27. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

28. The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. . . . [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.(A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.) Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters

29. The more ignorant we become the less value we set on science, and the less inclination we shall have to seek it.

30. There exists indeed an opposition to it [building of UVA, Jefferson's secular college] by the friends of William and Mary, which is not strong. The most restive is that of the priests of the different religious sects, who dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light; and scowl on it the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies on which they live. In this the Presbyterian clergy take the lead. The tocsin is sounded in all their pulpits, and the first alarm denounced is against the particular creed of Doctr. Cooper; and as impudently denounced as if they really knew what it is.[Letter to José Francesco Corrê a Da Serra - Monticello, April 11, 1820] Letters of Thomas Jefferson