I have not observed men’s honesty to increase with their riches.

This very day, to others the day of greatest mirth and jollity, sees me overwhelmed with more and greater misfortunes than have befallen a descendant of Adam for these thousand years past I am sure.

be good, be learned, & be industrious, & you will not want the aid of travelling to render you precious to your country, dear to your friends, happy within yourself. I repeat my advice to take a great deal of exercise, & on foot. health is the first requisite after morality.

above all things lose no occasion of exercising your dispositions to be grateful to be generous, to be charitable, to be humane, to be true, just, firm, orderly, couragious etc. consider every act of this kind as an exercise which will strengthen your moral faculties, & increase your worth.

of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful a tooth, as indolence. body & mind both unemployed, our being becomes a burthen, & every object about us loathsome, even the dearest. idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondria, & that a diseased...

a mind always employed is always happy. this is the true secret, the grand recipe for felicity. the idle are the only wretched. in a world which furnishes so many emploiments which are useful, & so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we we ever know what ennui is, or if we are ever...

A quotation commonly misattributed to Thomas Jefferson.

A quotation commonly misattributed to Thomas Jefferson.

A quotation commonly misattributed to Thomas Jefferson.

A quotation commonly misattributed to Thomas Jefferson.