Quotations on Exercise
From Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia
1785 August 19. (to Peter Carr). "Encourage all your virtuous dispositions, and exercise them whenever an opportunity arises, being assured that they will gain strength by exercise as a limb of the body does, and that exercise will make them habitual..."[1]
1786 August 27. (to Thomas Mann Randolph). "If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong. The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and all the exercises walking is best."[2]
1787 March 28. (to Martha Jefferson Randolph). "Exercise and application produce order in our affairs, health of body, chearfulness of mind, and these make us precious to our friends...You are not however to consider yourself as unemployed while taking exercise. That is necessary for your health, and health is the first of all objects. For this reason if you leave your dancing master for the summer, you must increase your other exercise...Music, drawing, books, invention and exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui."[3]
1787 August 10. (to Peter Carr). "I repeat my advice to take a great deal of exercise, and on foot. Health is the first requisite after morality."[4]
1790 June 11. (to John Garland Jefferson). "...leaving 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."[5]
1810 December 15. (to David Howell). "...I give more time to exercise of the body than of the mind, believing it wholesome to both."[6]
11811 January 6. (to Benjamin Rush). "From breakfast, or noon at latest, to dinner, I am mostly on horseback, attending to my farm or other concerns, which I find healthful to my body, mind and affairs."[7]
1811 August 17. (to Benjamin Rush). "The loss of the power of taking exercise would be a sore affliction to me. It has been the delight of my retirement to be in constant bodily activity, looking after my affairs. It was never damped as the pleasures of reading are, by the question of cui bono? for what object? I hope your health of body continues firm. Your works show that of your mind. The habits of exercise which your calling has given to both, will tend long to preserve them. The sedentary character of my public occupations sapped a constitution naturally sound and vigorous, and draws it to an earlier close."[8]
1812 January 21. (to John Adams). "You and I have been wonderful spared, and myself with remarkable health, and a considerable activity of body and mind. I am on horseback three or four hours of every day; visit three or four times a year a possession I have ninety miles distant, performing the winter journey on horseback. I walk little, however, a single mile being too much for me."[9]
1818 March 14. (to Nathaniel Burwell). "The ornaments too, and the amusements of life, are entitled to their portion of attention. These for a female, are dancing, drawing, and music. The first is a healthy exercise, elegant and very attractive for young people."[10]
1819 October 31. (to William Short). "Your love of repose will lead, in its progress, to a suspension of healthy exercise, a relaxation of mind, an indifference to everything around you, and finally to a debility of body, and hebetude of mind, the farthest of all things from the happiness which well-regulated indulgences of Epicurus ensure."[11]
1820 August 15. (to John Adams). "I can walk but little; but I ride six or eight miles a day without fatigue...Our University, four miles distant, gives me frequent exercise."[12]
