100+ Thomas Jefferson Inspirational Quotes to Build Confidence

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

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.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.

One man with courage is a majority.

The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.

I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.

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.

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.

If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.

We never repent of having eaten too little.

What we learn to do, we learn by doing.

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.

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.

Don’t talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Never spend your money before you have earned it.

Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.

Health is worth more than learning.

No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.

Delay is preferable to error.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.

A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.

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 blind-folded fear.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

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

Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

Power is not alluring to pure minds.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.

Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

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.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

Leave no authority existing not responsible to the people.

It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves.

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

I cannot live without books.

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them.

There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.

Difference of opinion is helpful in religion.

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.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.

The hole and the patch should be commensurate.

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.

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.

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.