tell Ellen, Cornelia & Virginia how d’ ye, give my affectionate esteem to your Papa & to your Mama my constant love. for yourself I deliver numberless kisses to this letter which you are to take from it. I hope in a few days we shall all be happy together at Monticello.

I have long since given up the expectation of any early provision for getting in the extinguishment of slavery among us. there are many virtuous men who would make any sacrifices to effect it. many equally virtuous who persuade themselves either that the thing is not wrong, or that it cannot be...

[Jefferson] is a pure republican, enlightened at the same time in chemistry, natural history and medicine. He is, in a word, a Citizen of the World and the friend of universal peace and happiness.

your Latin & Greek should be kept up assiduously by reading at spare hours: and, discontinuing the desultory reading of the schools. I would advise you to undertake a regular course of history & poetry in both languages. in Greek, go first thro’ the Cyropaedia, and then read Herodotus,...

I am not of the school which teaches us to look back for wisdom to our forefathers. from the wonderful advances in science and the arts which I have lived to see, I am sure we are wiser than our fathers & that our sons will be wiser than we are.

a more faithful, sober, discreet, honest and respectable man I have never known.

He was a fine young lad, and, according to what I was told was a general custom in Virginia among boys, he walked into the drawing room, without shoes or stockings, tho’ very neatly dressed in other respects.

we must use a good deal of economy in our wood, never cutting down new, where we can make the old do.

but Botany is the school for patience, and it’s amateurs learn resignation from daily disappointments.