Top 150 Daniel Defoe Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Though I don’t like the crew, I won’t sink the ship. In fact, in time of storm I’ll do my best to save it. You see, we are all in this craft and must sink or swim together.”

— Daniel Defoe

2. “Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.”

— Daniel Defoe

3. “Expect nothing and you’ll always be surprised.”

— Daniel Defoe

4. “Friends are good, – good, if well chosen.”

— Daniel Defoe

5. “The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.”

— Daniel Defoe

6. “Pleasure is a thief to business.”

— Daniel Defoe

7. “Redemption from sin is greater then redemption from affliction.”

— Daniel Defoe

8. “Wherever God erects a house of prayer the Devil always builds a chapel there; And ’t will be found, upon examination, the latter has the largest congregation.”

— Daniel Defoe

9. “Those people cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them because they see and covet what He has not given them. All of our discontents for what we want appear to me to spring from want of thankfulness for what we have.”

— Daniel Defoe

10. “It is never too late to be wise.”

— Daniel Defoe

11. “Never, ladies, marry a fool. Any husband rather than a fool. With some other husband you may be unhappy, but with a fool you will be miserable.”

— Daniel Defoe

12. “Today we love what tomorrow we hate, today we seek what tomorrow we shun, today we desire what tomorrow we fear, nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of.”

— Daniel Defoe

13. “The height of human wisdom is to bring our tempers down to our circumstances, and to make a calm within, under the weight of the greatest storm without.”

— Daniel Defoe

14. “It happen’d one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore.”

— Daniel Defoe

15. “I saw the Cloud, though I did not foresee the Storm.”

— Daniel Defoe

16. “It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.”

— Daniel Defoe

17. “Pride, the first peer and president of Hell.”

— Daniel Defoe

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

18. “Why then should women be denied the benefits of instruction? If knowledge and understanding had been useless additions to the sex, God almighty would never have given them capacities.”

— Daniel Defoe

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

— Daniel Defoe

20. “Wait on the Lord, and be of good cheer, and he shall strengthen thy heart; wait, I say, on the Lord.”

— Daniel Defoe

21. “Thus 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.”

— Daniel Defoe

22. “I had been tricked once by that Cheat called love, but the Game was over...”

— Daniel Defoe

23. “Thus fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself when apparent to the eyes ; and we find the burden of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about :...”

— Daniel Defoe

24. “Abused prosperity is oftentimes made the very means of our greatest adversity.”

— Daniel Defoe

25. “How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!”

— Daniel Defoe

26. “Business neglected is business lost.”

— Daniel Defoe

27. “All our discontents about what we want appeared to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”

— Daniel Defoe

28. “Avery fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together? In a word,’tis the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted.”

— Daniel Defoe

29. “This grieved me heartily ; and now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it.”

— Daniel Defoe

30. “As covetousness is the root of all evil, so poverty is the worst of all snares.”

— Daniel Defoe

31. “He that is rich is wise, And all men learned poverty despise.”

— Daniel Defoe

32. “One mischief always introduces another.”

— Daniel Defoe

33. “Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed.”

— Daniel Defoe

34. “And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true Sense of things, they will find Deliverance from Sin a much greater Blessing than Deliverance from Affliction.”

— Daniel Defoe

35. “All men would be tyrants if they could.”

— Daniel Defoe

36. “I know not what to call this, nor will I urge that it is a secret, overruling decree, that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction, even though it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open.”

— Daniel Defoe

37. “I am giving an account of what was, not of what ought or ought not to be.”

— Daniel Defoe

38. “Where love is the case, the doctor’s an ass.”

— Daniel Defoe

39. “It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.”

— Daniel Defoe

40. “The best of men cannot suspend their fate; The good die early, and the bad die late.”

— Daniel Defoe

41. “I hear much of people’s calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.”

— Daniel Defoe

42. “Nature has left this tincture in the blood, That all men would be tyrants if they could.”

— Daniel Defoe

43. “She is always married too soon, who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late, who gets a good one.”

— Daniel Defoe

44. “Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.”

— Daniel Defoe

45. “For sudden Joys, like Griefs, confound at first.”

— Daniel Defoe

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

46. “It is men of desperate fortunes on the one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who go abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road.”

— Daniel Defoe

47. “Law is but a heathen word for power.”

— Daniel Defoe

48. “Now, said I aloud, My dear Father’s Words are come to pass: God’s Justice has overtaken me, and I have none to help or hear me: I rejected the Voice of Providence.”

— Daniel Defoe

49. “Vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.”

— Daniel Defoe

50. “A rich man is an honest man – no thanks to him; for he would be a double knave, to cheat mankind when he had no need of it: he has no occasion to press upon his integrity, nor so much as to touch upon the borders of dishonesty.”

— Daniel Defoe