All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.
Source: The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Author
English · 1660-1731 · 18 quotes
English · 1660–1731
18 quotes in our collection
Daniel Defoe was the English journalist and novelist who published Robinson Crusoe in 1719 at the age of nearly sixty and in doing so invented the English novel as a form sustained by realistic detail and practical problem-solving. Born in London around 1660, he was a mercer, a brick manufacturer, a political pamphleteer, and a spy before he turned to fiction. He was pilloried for his satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, went bankrupt several times, and published more than five hundred works under his own name and others. Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year established narrative realism as a literary mode. His observation on middle age — youth without levity, age without decay — has the precision of someone who had passed through both stages with his eyes open and his pen running.
Common Themes
Collected Quotes
All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.
It is never too late to be wise.
I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed rather than what I wanted.
The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.
I resolved for the future to have two or three years' corn beforehand.
I had no competitor, none to dispute sovereignty or command with me.
I was lord of the whole manor; or, if I pleased, I might call myself king or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of.
How strange a chequer-work of Providence is the life of man!
I had now brought my state of life to be much easier in itself than it was at first, and much easier to my mind, as well as to my body.
I had enough to eat and supply my wants, and what was all the rest to me?
I had not the least advantage by it or benefit from it; but there it lay in a drawer, and grew mouldy with the damp of the cave in the wet seasons.
In the midst of life we are in death.
The sight was, as I thought, the most delightful that ever I saw.
I was very seldom idle, but having regularly divided my time according to the several daily employments that were before me, such as: first, my duty to God, and the reading the Scriptures.
I frequently sat down to meat with thankfulness, and admired the hand of God's providence, which had thus spread my table in the wilderness.
As to going home, shame opposed the best motions that offered to my thoughts, and it immediately occurred to me how I should be laughed at among the neighbours.
Being the third son of the family and not bred to any trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts.