Daniel Defoe Quotes

In their religion they are so uneven,
That each man goes his own byway to heaven.

We loved the doctrine for the teacher's sake.

From this amphibious ill-born mob began
That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman.

And of all plagues with which mankind are cursed,
Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.

All evils are to be considered with the good that is in them, and with what worse attends them.

The art of war, which I take to be the highest perfection of human knowledge.

Wise men affirm it is the English way
Never to grumble till they come to pay.

For justice is the end of government.

No panegyric needs their praise record;
An Englishman ne'er wants his own good word.

How frequently, in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which, when we are fallen into, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction we are fallen into.

In trouble to be troubled
Is to have your trouble doubled.

When kings the sword of justice first lay down,
They are no kings, though they possess the crown.
Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,
The good of subjects is the end of kings.

But English gratitude is always such
To hate the hand which doth oblige too much.

He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing - viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as the standard of felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches. He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters.

Self-destruction is the effect of cowardice in the highest extreme.