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.

Our public credit is good, but the abundance of paper has produced a spirit of gambling in the funds, which has laid up our ships at the wharves as too slow instruments of profit, and has even disarmed the hand of the tailor of his needle and thimble. They say the evil will cure itself. I wish it may; but I have rarely seen a gamester cured, even by the disasters of his vocation.

But under the beaming, constant and almost vertical sun of Virginia, shade is our Elysium. In the absence of this no beauty of the eye can be enjoyed.

I have overlived the generation with which mutual labors & perils begat mutual confidence and influence.

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

The mass of the citizens is the safest depositary of their own rights.

The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.