Thomas Jefferson Quotes

If I have to go to New York or something, I'll bring my books and read and do homework. It's not really a big deal.

Map out your future, but do it in pencil.

Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.

I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself. I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: ‘Excuse me, it was all a dream,’ and by that time I may have found one who will say: ‘Not at all, it was true, absolutely true.’

If I do enough different things in enough different ways, I may, eventually, do something right.

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple stupid behavior.

At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.

[Wellesley College] is about as meaningful to the educational process in America as a perfume factory is to the national economy.

I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.

May you constantly nourish your testimonies of the gospel that they will be a protection to you against the buffetings of the adversary.

Be careful what you choose: You may get it.

At times truth may not seem probable.

One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.

If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of symbols representing one single aspect of the phenomena may produce correct, verifiable predictions, and yet completely ignore all other aspects whose ensemble constitutes reality.

I hang by a thread, but it is (if I may so speak) of Christ's spinning

Death fosters life that life may suckle death.

All right, your knees may be knocking but that shouldn't prevent you from going ahead and doing what you need to do.

Surely, no one hoped for so many things. Hold the flowers close to your heart; they may someday bloom.

In things which we know, everyone will trust us ... and we may do as we please, and no one will like to interfere with us; and we are free, and masters of others; and these things will be really ours, for we shall turn them to our good.

I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.

I'm a very private person, regardless of what the world may think of me.

Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.

Ensure that both plan and dispositions are flexible, adaptable to circumstances. Your plan should foresee and provide for a next step in case of success or failure.