The elastic behavior of materials is usually described by direct stress±strain relationships which use the fact that there is a one-to-one connection between the strain and stress tensors $\varepsilon$ and $\sigma$; some mechanical elastic potentials can then be defined so as to express the stress tensor as the derivative of the strain potential with respect to the strain tensor, or conversely the latter as the derivative of the complementary (stress) potential with respect to the former. Nevertheless, these potentials are restricted to specific thermodynamic conditions. This purely mechanical treatment may be generalized and improved by integrating its temperature dependence and by connecting the elastic potentials with the classical thermodynamic functions within a consistent thermodynamic framework. This leads to a more general definition of thermoelasticity (Sect. 1), which can be used for a better understanding of the properties of the elastic moduli (Sect. 2), for a natural definition of rubber elasticity (Sect. 3), and for the prediction of the effective thermal expansion coefficients of heterogeneous materials (Sect. 4).