Robinson Crusoe Quotes

#1. 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. #Quote by W. H. Auden

#2. The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place. #Quote by Paul Theroux

#3. I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Chums Annual.' At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because Shanghai was an American zone of influence. #Quote by J.G. Ballard

#4. 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 #Quote by Gilbert Ryle

#5. 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. #Quote by Wladyslaw Szpilman

#6. The novels of Daniel Defoe are fundamental to eighteenth-century ways of thinking. They range from the quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year, an almost journalistic (but fictional) account of London between 1664 and 1665 (when the author was a very young child), to Robinson Crusoe, one of the most enduring fables of Western culture. If the philosophy of the time asserted that life was, in Hobbes's words, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', novels showed ways of coping with 'brutish' reality (the plague; solitude on a desert island) and making the best of it. There was no questioning of authority as there had been throughout the Renaissance.
Instead, there was an interest in establishing and accepting authority, and in the ways of 'society' as a newly ordered whole.

Thus, Defoe's best-known heroine, Moll Flanders, can titillate her readers with her first-person narration of a dissolute life as thief, prostitute, and incestuous wife, all the time telling her story from the vantage point of one who has been accepted back into society and improved her behaviour. #Quote by Ronald Carter

#7. There is always an unconscious collaboration among artists ... the artist who imagine himself a Robinson Crusoe is either a primitive or a fool. #Quote by William Baziotes

#8. For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which
we are told
a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome. #Quote by Lawrence Osborne

#9. And for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind. (2) #Quote by Daniel Defoe

#10. 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. #Quote by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#11. I don't know where my romanticism comes from. My mom and dad would read to me a lot. 'Treasure Island,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' tales of chivalry and knights, things like that. Those are the stories I loved growing up. #Quote by Daniel Radcliffe

#12. In 1932 Pravda published a short story by Ilf and Petrov, titled 'How Robinson Was Created,' about a magazine editor who commissions a Soviet Robinson Crusoe from a writer named Moldavantsev. The writer submits a manuscript about a Soviet young man triumphing over nature on a desert island. The editor likes the story, but says that a Soviet Robinson would be unthinkable without a trade union committee consisting of a chairman, two permanent members, and a female activist to collect membership dues. The committee, in its turn, would be unthinkable without a safe deposit box, a chairman's bell, a pitcher of water, and a tablecloth ('red or green, it doesn't matter; I don't want to limit your artistic imagination'), and broad masses of working people. The author objects by saying that so many people could not possible be washed ashore by a single ocean wave:
'Why a wave?' asked the editor, suddenly surprised.
'How else would the masses end up on the island? It is a a desert island, after all!'
'Who said it was a desert island? You're getting me confused. Okay, so there's an island, or, even better, a peninsula. It's safer that way. And that's where a series of amusing, original, and interesting adventures will take place. There'll be some trade union work going on, but not enough. The female activist will expose certain deficiencies - in the area of due collection, for example. She'll be supported by the broad masses. And then there be the repentant chairman. At t #Quote by Yuri Slezkine

#13. 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. #Quote by Dumitru Tepeneag

#14. When my younger son was 13 years old, he asked me to read 'Swallows and Amazons' to him while he made models. He liked it so much that I ended up reading all thirteen of Ransome's books, including the ones that I missed out on. This led my son to 'Treasure Island,' 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Coral Island.' #Quote by Michelle Magorian

#15. We live in a global village. No country can live in isolation of others like Robinson Crusoe. #Quote by Li Keqiang

#16. And in that one night's wickedness I drowned all my repentance,all my reflections upon my past conduct,and all my resolution for the future. #Quote by Daniel Defoe

#17. Have I gotten everything right? I doubt it. Not even the great Daniel Defoe did that; in Robinson Crusoe, our hero strips naked, swims out to the ship he has recently escaped....and then fills up his pockets with items he will need to stay alive on his desert island. #Quote by Stephen King

#18. 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? #Quote by Samuel Johnson

#19. Just sit right back
And you'll hear a tale
A tale of a fateful trip,
That started from this tropic port,
Aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailin' lad,
The Skipper brave and sure,
Five passengers set sail that day,
For a three hour tour,
A three hour tour.


The weather started getting rough,
The tiny ship was tossed.
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
The Minnow would be lost.
The Minnow would be lost.

The ship set ground on the shore
Of this uncharted desert isle
With Gilligan,
The Skipper too.
The millionaire
And his wife,
The movie star,
The professor and Mary Ann,
Here on Gilligan's Isle.



So this is the tale of our castaways,
They're here for a long long time.
They'll have to make the best of things,
It's an uphill climb.

The first mate and his Skipper too
Will do their very best,
To make the others comf'terble
In their tropic island nest.

No phone, no lights, no motor car,
Not a single luxury
Like Robinson Crusoe
It's primitive as can be.

So join us here each week my friends,
You're sure to get a smile,
From seven stranded castaways
Here on Gilligan's Isle! #Quote by Sherwood Schwartz

#20. 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. #Quote by Carlos Fuentes

#21. 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. #Quote by Sophie Scholl

#22. I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish with their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven't the faintest idea what it's about or why people should enjoy killing one another; you look at a place like Albania - it was constantly staring me in the eyes - and you say to yourself, yesterday it was Greek, to-day it's Italian, to-morrow it may be German or Japanese, and you let it be anything it chooses to be. When you're right with yourself it doesn't matter which flag is flying over your head or who owns what or whether you speak English or Monongahela. The absence of newspapers, the absence of news about what men are doing in different parts of the world to make life more livable or unlivable is the greatest single boon. If we could just eliminate newspapers a g #Quote by Henry Miller

#23. My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time . . . #Quote by Charles Dickens

#24. 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. #Quote by Robin Hobb

#25. 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. #Quote by B.C. Forbes

#26. Juan Fernandez islands." Cochrane drew on the cigar and watched its smoke drift out the window. "The islands are three hundred fifty miles off the coast, in the middle of nothing! They're where Robinson Crusoe was marooned, or rather where Alexander Selkirk, who was the original of Crusoe, spent four not uncomfortable years. #Quote by Bernard Cornwell

#27. But the Count hadn't the temperament for revenge; he hadn't the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn't the fanciful ego to dram of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world's Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island's topography, it's climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand. #Quote by Amor Towles

#28. Even with Las Vegas giddy around me I felt as alone as Robinson Crusoe. #Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

#29. 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. #Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

#30. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death. #Quote by Richard Matheson

#31. You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years - generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco - and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad - ROBINSON CRUSOE. When I want advice - ROBINSON CRUSOE. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much - ROBINSON CRUSOE. I have worn out six stout ROBINSON CRUSOES with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and ROBINSON CRUSOE put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.
#Quote by Wilkie Collins

#32. I take it that "gentleman" is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as "a man" , we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow men, but in relation to himself, - to life – to time – to eternity. A cast-away lonely as Robinson Crusoe- a prisoner immured in a dungeon for life – nay, even a saint in Patmos, has his endurance, his strength, his faith, best described by being spoken of as "a man". I am rather weary of this word " gentlemanly" which seems to me to be often inappropriately used, and often too with such exaggerated distortion of meaning, while the full simplicity of the noun "man", and the adjective "manly" are unacknowledged. #Quote by Elizabeth Gaskell

#33. I'm beginning to wish I'd had you deported after the first murder! Death seems to follow you around like the plague. #Quote by Steve Robinson

#34. You okay?" Jared said.

"You've never called me Aunt before. Bring it in. Come on, gimme hugs."

"Can we not make a big deal?"

"No. Deals will be big. #Quote by Eden Robinson

#35. I have little tolerance for noise and stupidity. #Quote by Andrew J. Robinson

#36. We build our own cultures not only on the achievements of those that have come before but on their ruins. #Quote by Ken Robinson

#37. That's what the family is for,' he said. 'Calvin says it is the Providence of God that we look after those nearest to us. So it is the will of God that we help our brothers, and it is equally the will of God that we accept their help and receive the blessing of it. As if it came from the Lord Himself. Which it does. So I want you boys to promise me that you will help each other. #Quote by Marilynne Robinson

#38. If you feel like loving me, if you've got the notion, I second that emotion. #Quote by Smokey Robinson

#39. Leadership is a dynamic process that expresses our skill, our aspirations, and our essence as human beings. #Quote by Catherine Robinson-Walker

#40. a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent-wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wire stripper, X-acto knives, a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler's screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, all kinds of tape, a plumber's bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long-nosed pliers, vise-grip pliers, a tap-and-die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding-and-cutting set, a wheelbarrow - and so on. And #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#41. Defense is what matters. Scoring doesn't interest me. #Quote by David Robinson

#42. Of course we must do it! It is a matter of spirit! And that's not to say it could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that's always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it." He #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#43. Maybe that's what a marriage is," Mqaret said. "Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#44. Nothing was ever normal again.
Many lives change like that -- all of a sudden, and forever. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#45. Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. #Quote by Marilynne Robinson

#46. Good fortune is not only good fortune, and over the years things happened in that family that caused some terrible regret. Still, for years it all seemed to me to be blindingly beautiful. And it was. #Quote by Marilynne Robinson

#47. In a world where lifelong employment in the same job is a thing of the past, creativity is not a luxury. It is essential for personal security and fulfillment. #Quote by Ken Robinson

#48. The door opened to reveal something like the opposite of Inspector Genette: a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos - toad, newt, frog - even the very words were ugly. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#49. As much as I loved Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam, and Don Newcombe, I loved watching Willie Mays play more than all of them combined, even if he played for the 'bad guys!' #Quote by Cheech Marin

#50. Black History Month is a great celebration for Black people everywhere. I just hope we get to the point as Black people that we celebrate everyday like it is Black History month by living our lives and aspiring to be all we can. Many people lost their lives for us to have the privileges we have so we need to honor them by striving to be the best we can be. #Quote by Crystal Robinson

#51. One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#52. The problem is that too often, and in too many ways, current systems of mass education are a catastrophe in themselves. Far from looking to the future, too often they are facing stubbornly towards the past. #Quote by Ken Robinson

#53. And the old ones were burly people, as strong as bears or wolverines. One of Thorn's stories told how an old one had married a bear by mistake, and neither of them had noticed; their daughter told them about it years later, not at all pleased with them. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#54. With the Chinese and Indians, mythos destroyed
logos; with Aristotle, logos destroyed mythos; with Aquinas, mythos perfected logos. This is no small reason to believe that Aquinas's mythos was not mythology. #Quote by Paul Athanasius Robinson

#55. academic literature. Major influences on my thinking include Douglass North, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on institutions; the pre-eminent economist of modern Africa, Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and Plundered Planet; Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist and author of The Mystery of Capital; Andrei Shleifer and his numerous co-authors, who have pioneered an economic approach to the comparative study of legal systems; and Jim Robinson and Daron Acemoglu, whose book Why Nations Fail asks similar questions to the ones that interest me. #Quote by Niall Ferguson

#56. There are very few courses around Detroit I haven't played. #Quote by Smokey Robinson

#57. Anna turned away abruptly. "You needn't bother," she said. But the girl held her back. "No, don't go! Don't be such a goose. I want to know you! Don't you want to know me? #Quote by Joan G. Robinson

#58. Education doesn't need to be reformed- it needs to be transformed. #Quote by Ken Robinson

#59. It was as if the light had coaxed a flowering from the frost, which before seemed barren and parched as salt. The grass shone with petal colors, and water drops spilled from all the trees as innumerably as petals. #Quote by Marilynne Robinson

#60. Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#61. But I believe also the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always a sense of the sacredness of the person who is the object... When you love someone to the degree you love her, you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself. #Quote by Marilynne Robinson

#62. I asked her who he was and she said, "He was a man ahead of his time." She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys - any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about "the white devil" Mommy simply felt those references didn't apply to her. #Quote by James McBride

#63. The way we're going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That's where you get the most out of it. #Quote by Chris Robinson

#64. Peace, I leave with you. My peace I give you," I whispered #Quote by M. Robinson

#65. True leadership must have follower-ship. Management styles can vary, but even an autocrat needs people who believe and simply don't follow from fear. #Quote by James D. Robinson III

#66. The paradox is that when you can get into right versus wrong bickering in personal relationships -- even if you believe you have won -- you have lost. #Quote by Tony Robinson

#67. When I first saw you, you were like ... ' He shakes his head, tugs gently on my hair. 'A rainbow. I always knew you came with a storm. #Quote by Emma Trevayne

#68. You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#69. Put your trust in me, let this love be. This is for real, let time stand still. #Quote by Smokey Robinson

#70. I come from a family of traders; my grandmother and my mother were very good at making money. #Quote by Anne Robinson

#71. We must understand the role of human rights as empowering of individuals and communities. By protecting these rights, we can help prevent the many conflicts based on poverty, discrimination and exclusion (social, economic and political) that continue to plague humanity and destroy decades of development efforts. The vicious circle of human rights violations that lead to conflicts-which in turn lead to more violations-must be broken. I believe we can break it only by ensuring respect for all human rights. #Quote by Mary Robinson

#72. Artificial needs stimulated artificial greeds. #Quote by Dave Robinson & Judy Groves

#73. They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#74. Earthly nature may be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal, itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly an object of wonder. #Quote by Marilynne Robinson

#75. Scared of her, solicitous of her, in love with her - she had seen all that. And shouting at her furiously for some small treachery, or for nothing at all; she had certainly seen that too. Because he had loved her. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#76. Give me five players like Robinson and a pitcher and I'll beat any nine-man team in baseball. #Quote by Chuck Dressen

#77. I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. #Quote by Ken Robinson