Daniel Defoe

"We never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it."

"For Englishmen are neer contented long."

"Robinson Crusoe did not deal with love. Defoes other stories, which are happily forgotten, are bad in their very essence. Roxana is an accurate example of what a bad book may be. It relates the adventures of a woman thoroughly depraved, and yet for the most part successful, -- is intended to attract by licentiousness, and puts off till the end the stale scrap of morality which is brought in as a salve to the conscience of the writer. Putting aside Robinson Crusoe, which has been truly described as an accident, Defoes teaching as a novelist has been altogether bad."

"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."

"To-day we love what to-morrow we hate; to-day we seek what to-morrow we shun; to-day we desire what to-morrow we fear, nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of."

"The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond; and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear. And ’tis manifest, that as the rational soul distinguishes us from brutes; so education carries on the distinction, and makes some less brutish than others."

"There are some secret springs in the affections which, when they are set a-going by some object in view, or, though not in view, yet rendered present to the mind by the power of imagination, that motion carries out the soul, by its impetuosity, to such violent, eager embracings of the object, that the absence of it is insupportable."

"We loved the doctrine for the teachers sake."

"The best of men cannot suspend their fate: The good die early, and the bad die late."

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

"Hail, hieroglyphic State machine, Contrived to punish fancy in; Men that are men in thee can feel no pain, And all thy insignificance disdain!"

"Next, bring some lawyers to thy bar, By innuendo they might all stand there; There let them expiate that guilt, And pay for all that blood their tongues have spilt. These are the mountebanks of state, Who by the sleight of tongues can crimes create, And dress up trifles in the robes of fate, The mastiffs of a Government, To worry and run down the innocent."