However, music and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

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.

As happy a man as any in the world, for the whole world seems to smile upon me!

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.

Find myself £43 worse than I was the last month ... chiefly arisen from my layings-out in clothes for myself and wife; viz., for her, about £12, and for myself, £55 or thereabouts.

The best of a bad bargain.

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.