Thomas Jefferson

• Be polite to all, but intimate with few.
• 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.
• Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any.
• Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.
• Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
• Don't talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.
• Every day is lost in which we do not learn something useful. Man has no nobler or more valuable possession than time.
• Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?
• He who knows best knows how little he knows.
• He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it the second time.
• Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
• How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.
• I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
• I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
• I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
• I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
• 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.
• Never buy a thing you do not want, because it is cheap, it will be dear to you.
• Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
• Never put off to tomorrow what you can do to-day.
• Never spend your money before you have earned it.
• Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
• Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
• Take care of your cents: dollars will take care of themselves.
• The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.
• When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.
• Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.