Robinson Crusoe

I really enjoyed reading this book.  Just randomly chose it off of my classic book list and glad I did.  I actually hadn’t read it before.  Written in the early 1700s it fit right in with the seafaring culture and adventure which had popular appeal.  Even now in the twenty first century I found the adventure appealing.  Of course, being stranded on an island for years and years isn’t something you want for yourself but there is a certain appeal to experience that type of adventure.  I enjoyed the first person approach of the book through the eyes of Crusoe’s journal.  Although the book is fiction I felt it was infused with true life principles and challenges.  Practical issues of survival and creativity were fun to read.  Deeper issues of morality and religion were intriguing to read given the context.  Just enough suspense throughout keeps you turning the pages!  I would certainly recommend this book, but being a longstanding classic you probably don’t need me to.  Below are some specific excerpts I really liked.  Read, enjoy, and let it persuade you to read the entire book!

• “Oh what ridiculous resolution men take when possessed with fear!  It deprives them of the use of those means which reason offers for their relief.”
• “All these things tended to showing me more and more how far my condition was from being miserable, compared to some others; nay, to many other particulars of life which it might have pleased God to have made my lot.  It put me upon reflecting how little repining there would be among mankind at any condition of life, if people would rather compare their condition with those that are worse, or order to be thankful, than be always comparing them with those which are better, to assist their murmurings and complainings.”
• “This renewed a contemplation which often had come to my thoughts in former time, when first I bean to see the merciful dispositions of Heaven in the dangers we run through in this life; How wonderfully we are delivered when we know nothing of it: how, when we are in a quandary, as we call it, a doubt or hesitation whether to go this way or that way, a secret hint shall direct us this way when we intended to go that way; may, when sense, our own inclination, and perhaps business, has called to go the other way, yet a strange impression upon the mind, from when we know not what springs, and by we know not what power, shall overrule us to go this way; and it shall afterwards appear that had we gone that way which we should have gone, and even to our imagination out to have gone, we should have been ruined and lost.  Upon these and many like reflections, I afterwards made it a certain rule with me, that whenever I found those secret hints or pressings of my mind to doing or not doing anything that presented, or to going this way or that way, I never failed to obey the secret dictate, though I knew no other reason for it than that such a pressure or such a hint hung upon my mind.”
• “And it may not be amiss for all people who shall meet with my story to make this just observation from it – namely, how frequently in the course of our lives the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which, when we are fallen into , is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction we are fallen into.”
• “…from whence I observe that the expectation of evil is more bitter than the suffering, especially if there is no room to shake off that expectation or those apprehensions.”
• “I learned here again to observe that it is very rare that the providence of God casts us into any condition of life so low, or any misery so great, but we may see something or other to be thankful for, and may see others in worse circumstances than our own.”
• “There are some secret moving springs in the affections, which when they are set agoing by some object in view, or be it some object, though not in view, yet rendered present to the mind by the power of imagination, that motion carries our the soul by its impetuosity to such violent eager embracings of the object, that the absence of it is unsupportable.”
• “How infinitely good that Providence is which has provided, in its government of mankind, such narrow bounds to his sight and knowledge of things; and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand dangers, the sight of which, if discovered to him, would distract his mind and sink his spirits, he is kept serene and calm by having the events of things hid from his eyes, and knowing nothing of the dangers which  surround him!”
• “As to all the disputes, wranglings, strife and contention which has happened in the world about religion, whether niceties in doctrines or schemes of church government, they were all perfectly useless to us, as, for aught I can yet see, they have been to all the rest in the world.  We had the sure guide to heaven – namely, the Word of God; and we had, blessed be God, comfortable views of the Spirit of God, teaching and instructing us by his Word, leading us into all truth, and making us both willing and obedient to the instruction of his Word; and I cannot see the least use that the greatest knowledge of the disputed points in religion, which have made such confusions in the world, would have been to us if we could have obtained it.”