Fight the good fight; and always call to mind that it is not you who are mortal, but this body of ours. For your true being is not discerned by perceiving your physical appearance. But 'what a man's mind is, that is what he is' not that individual human shape that we identify through our senses.

It having been a very cold night last night I had got some cold, and so in pain by wind, and a sure precursor of pain is sudden letting off farts, and when that stops, then my passages stop and my pain begins

I know not how to abstain from reading.

Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.

At the Royall Oake Taverne, I drank a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.

Thanks be to God, since my leaving drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.

Before I went to bed, I sat up till 2 a-clock in my chamber, reading of Mr. Hooke's Microscopical Observations, the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life.