Robinson Crusoe Quotes

• [Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.

  James Joyce

  Persistence, Independence, Apathy

  "Daniel Defoe". Book by James Joyce, translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, pp. 24-25, 1964.

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• Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

  James Joyce

  Friday, True Life, Looks

  James Joyce, General Press (2016). “Ulysses”, p.97, GENERAL PRESS

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• There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny, is it Buffon? No-it is Robinson Crusoe.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Education, Book, Buffon

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• And now I was lonelier, I supposed, than anyone else in the world. Even Defoe's creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being. Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going. But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror. I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live.

  Wladyslaw Szpilman

  Running, Thinking, People

  Wladyslaw Szpilman (2011). “The Pianist”, p.145, Hachette UK

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• The literary game is the abyss of human society itself: interactive, playful and tragic. We can't live alone. For me, Robinson [Crusoe] is either a false myth or else he represents the denial of human society. We can't play by ourselves. In literature, it's even more complicated, because one has to play with an indeterminate number of players simultaneously and every game is different. The other player can abandon your game at any time...to go play chess.

  Dumitru Tepeneag

  Player, Games, Numbers

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

  W. H. Auden

  Dirty, Writing, Islands

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Writing"), (p. 22), 1962.

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• There is always an unconscious collaboration among artists.. ..the artist who imagine himself a Robinson Crusoe is either a primitive or a fool.

  William Baziotes

  Artist, Collaboration, Fool

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• Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.

  Carlos Fuentes

  Fashion, Hero, Technology

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• The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul--our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment--our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Friday, Destiny, Rights

  Speech before Senate Judiciary Committee, 18 Jan. 1892

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• Which class is happiest, the rich, the middle class or the poor? A very successful executive of a large organization touches upon this vital subject in a long letter to all his salesmen. He uses as his text a passage from Robinson Crusoe which included this: ""My Father bid 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, and were not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind.

  B. C. Forbes

  Father, Successful, Class

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• The organizer of industry who thinks he has 'made' himself and his business has found a whole social system ready to his hand in skilled workers, machinery, a market, peace and order - a vast apparatus and a pervasive atmosphere, the joint creation of millions of men and scores of generations. Take away the whole social factor, and we have not Robinson Crusoe with his salvage from the wreck and his acquired knowledge, but the native savage living on roots, berries and vermin.

  Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse

  Thinking, Men, Hands

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• Most people, it seems, think that Robinson Crusoe when he landed on his Island had nothing to keep him from starvation or anything else. As a matter of fact he had twelve raft loads of supplies that he took off the wrecked ship. He had as much food and furniture as if he had had a delicatessen store and Fifth Avenue outside his hut.

  Will Cuppy

  Thinking, Islands, People

  "Living from Can to Mouth". Comic interview with Jo Ranson for Brooklyn Eagle Magazine, No. 5, November 24, 1929.

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• It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Civilization, Mind, Example

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1908). “Robert Louis Stevenson”

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• I still feel like a castaway, th elast of a once numerous species. It was as though Robinson Crusoe discovered the telltale footprint on the beach and then realized that it was his own. Myself, small as a leaf, thin as water, begins to cry.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Beach, Water, Cry

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• Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress?

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Progress, Pilgrim

  In Hester Lynch Piozzi 'Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson' (1786) p. 281

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• And I could weep at how mean people are and how they betray their fellow creatures, perhaps for the sake of personal advantage. It is enough to make a person lose heart sometimes. I often wish I lived on a Robinson Crusoe island.

  Sophie Scholl

  Mean, Heart, Islands

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• Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.

  William Golding

  Differences, Example, Roles

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• In Soviet times the border was closed so we couldn't get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn't have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.

  Wladimir Klitschko

  Country, Ocean, Reading

  "Wladimir Klitschko: Dr Feelgood has a cure for David Haye's disrespect". Interview with Paul Hayward, www.theguardian.com. June 25, 2011.

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• The importance of the romantic element does not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impressions of virtue to works of fiction; and Adam Clarke gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spiritual world; and he felt sure of having been a coward, but for romances. He declared that he had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbor and himself from Robinson Crusoe than from all the books, except the Bible, that were known to his youth.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Spiritual, Believe, Book

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

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• History presents the pleasantest features of poetry and fiction,--the majesty of the epic, the moving accidents of the drama, the surprises and moral of the romance. Wallace is a ruder Hector; Robinson Crusoe is not stranger that Croesus; the Knights of Ashby never burnish the page of Scott with richer lights of lance and armor than the Carthaginians, winding down the Alps, cast upon Livy.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Drama, Moving, Epic

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

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• Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

  Walter Lippmann

  New York, Men, Self

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• I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.

  Henning Mankell

  Sorry, Writing, Feelings

  FaceBook post by Henning Mankell from Mar 03, 2012

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• Only through the medium of the public physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is in its own place and in each of us lies an inner life, the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear, and jolt one another's bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another's minds

  Gilbert Ryle

  Lying, Differences, People

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• I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

  Robin Hobb

  Running, Reading, Book

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• No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.

  Richard Matheson

  Ocean, Night, Islands

  Richard Matheson (2017). “Richard Matheson Thrillers: I Am Legend, Someone is Bleeding, Ride the Nightmare, Fury on Sunday”, p.67, RosettaBooks

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