189 Quotes by Daniel Defoe

That all plays, bear baitings, 88 games, singing of ballads, buckler play, 89 or such like causes of assemblies of people, be utterly prohibited, and the parties offending severely punished by every alderman in his ward.

Thus fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger it self, when apparent to the eyes; and we find the burthen of anxiety greater by much, than the evil which we are anxious about; and which was worse than all this, I had not that relief in this trouble from the resignation I used to practise, that I hop’d to have.

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

The face of London was now indeed strangely altered:.

Books are useful only to such whose genius are suitable to the subject of them.

I had two important things before me; the one was the carrying on my Business and Shop; which was considerable, and in which was embark’d all my Effects in the World; and the other was the Preservation of my Life in so dismal a Calamity, as I saw apparently was coming upon the whole City; and which however great it was, my Fears perhaps as well as other Peoples, represented to be much greater than it could be.

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.

It is incredible, if their account is to be depended upon, what a prodigious number of those creatures were destroyed. I think they talked of forty thousand dogs and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house.

I did what I never had done in all my life – I kneeled down, and prayed to God to fulfil the promise to me, that if I called upon Him in the day of trouble, He would deliver me.