Thomas Jefferson Quotes About Nature

• A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Being Strong, Nature, Character

  Quoted in Colin Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

• How sublime to look down on the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!

  Thomas Jefferson

  Nature, Rain, Feet

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, 2: Correspondence and Private Papers”, p.49

• For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Nature, Environmental, Links

• I never before knew the full value of trees. Under them I breakfast, dine, write, read and receive my company.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Nature, Writing, Garden

  Thomas Jefferson, Jerry Holmes (2002). “Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts”, p.138, Rowman & Littlefield

• The movements of nature are in a never ending circle. The animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train. For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish by piece-meal; a conclusion not warranted by the local disappearance of one or two species of animals, and opposed by the thousands and thousands of instances of the renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects, animal, vegetable, and mineral.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Nature, Moving, Animal

  "Revenge of the Meat-Eating Megatherium" by Brian Switek, www.wired.com. June 9, 2011.

• The general desire of men to live by their heads rather than their hands, and the strong allurements of great cities to those who have any turn for dissipation, threaten to make them here, as in Europe, the sinks of voluntary misery.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Nature, Strong, Men

  Thomas Jefferson (1861). “Correspondence”, p.514

• The Earth is given as a common for men to labor and live in.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Nature, Educational, Men

• When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Respect, Nature, Law

  Declaration of Independence (1776)

• I hold it to be one of the distinguishing excellences of elective over hereditary successions that the talents which nature has provided in sufficient proportion, should be selected by the society for the govenment of their affairs, rather than that this should be be transmitted through the loins of knaves and fools passing from the debauches of the table to those of the bed.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Nature, Excellence, Bed

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1859). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence”, p.466

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

  Thomas Jefferson

  Weed, Nature, Environmental

  Thomas Jefferson, Jerry Holmes (2002). “Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts”, p.120, Rowman & Littlefield

• It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Art, Nature, Science

  "Early history of the University of Virginia : as contained in the letters of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell, hitherto unpublished". Book by Thomas Jefferson, 1856.

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