A Quote by Thomas Jefferson

We must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.

Thomas Jefferson

Quote Topics

Brave Convince Duty Enemies Friends Just Just Friends Meet Must Our World

Quote Author

Thomas Jefferson
American - President
April 13, 1743 - July 4, 1826

I am ever unwilling that [peace] should be disturbed as long as the rights and interests of the nations can be preserved. But whensoever hostile aggressions on these require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.

Thomas Jefferson

Take no duty of the Guard lightly. Friends must not be enemies Just as enemies must not be friends. Discerning the two is a life's work.

David Petersen

Someone who wants to attain enlightenment must be brave. He must rush into the crowd of enemies with a dagger. In the practice of Zen, enemies are our delusive thoughts and passions.

Yamada Koun

To his enemies the householder must be a hero. Them he must resist. That is the duty of the householder. He must not sit down in a corner and weep, and talk nonsense about non-resistance. If he does not show himself a hero to his enemies he has not done his duty.

Swami Vivekananda

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Abraham Lincoln

It is in the field of prayer that life's critical battles are lost or won. We must conquer all our circumstances there. We must first of all bring them there. We must survey them there. We must master them there. In prayer we bring our spiritual enemies into the Presence of God and we fight them there. Have you tried that? Or have you been satisfied to meet and fight your foes in the open spaces of the world?

John Henry Jowett

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is better to decide a difference between enemies than friends, for one of our friends will certainly become an enemy and one of our enemies a friend.

Pierre Jean de Beranger

We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.

Pythagoras

Strangers are just friends waiting to happen. To become a good man, one must have faithful friends, or outright enemies.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Humans tend to segregate the world: enemies on one side, friends on the other. Friends are the people we know. Enemies are the Other. You can do just about anything to the Other. It doesn't matter if this Other is actually guilty of any crimes, because it is a matter of emotion, not logic. You see angry people aren't interested in justice, they just want an excuse to vent their rage.

Ilona Andrews

We need a more peaceful world, growing out of more peaceful families and neighborhoods and communities. To secure and cultivate such peace, "we must love others, even our enemies as well as our friends"

Howard W. Hunter

Prudence is a duty which we owe ourselves, and if we will be so much our own enemies as to neglect it, we are not to wonder if the world is deficient in discharging their duty to us; for when a man lays the foundation of his own ruin, others too often are apt to build upon it.

Henry Fielding

To accept Christ is to know the meaning of the words 'as he is, so are we in this world.' We accept his friends as our friends, his enemies as our enemies, his ways as our ways, his rejection as our rejection, his cross as our cross, his life as our life and his future as our future. If this is what we mean when we advise the seeker to accept Christ, we had better explain it to him. He may get into deep spiritual trouble unless we do.