My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.
Interpretation
Jefferson expresses a fear of enduring a prolonged life, suggesting that living too long can lead to suffering or despair.
In this quote, Thomas Jefferson reflects on the idea that a long life is not always a blessing. He implies that the burden of living too long might be filled with dread and suffering, perhaps due to the loss of loved ones, diminishing health, or the weight of regret. Jefferson's words provoke thought about the quality of life versus its quantity, emphasizing that mere survival can become a source of distress when life's joys wane.
In practice
During a discussion about aging, one might quote Jefferson to express concerns about the implications of living a long life.
The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.
I, place economy among the first & most important republican virtues, & public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared
We must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
Very many and very meritorious were the worthy patriots who assisted in bringing back our government to its republican tack. To preserve it in that, will require unremitting vigilance.
A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances.
We are all a part of every person we have ever met.
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
Every brain is civilized, Every nerve is analyzed, Everything is criticized when you are in need.
Feminism without spirituality runs the risk of becoming what it rejects: an elitist ideology, arrogant, superficial and separatist, closed to everything but itself. Without a spiritual base that obligates it beyond itself, calls it out of itself for the sake of others, a pedagogical feminism turned in on itself can become just one more intellectual ghetto that the world doesn’t notice and doesn’t need.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.