Literary Birthday – 23 February – Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys was born 23 February 1633, and died 26 May 1703.
Samuel Pepys Quotes
- Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.
- Music [is] a science peculiarly productive of a pleasure that no state of life, public or private, secular or sacred; no difference of age or season; no temper of mind or condition of health exempt from present anguish; nor, lastly, distinction of quality, renders either improper, untimely, or unentertaining.
- I did not like that Clergy should meddle with matters of state.
- Now public business takes up so much of my time that I must get time a Sundays or a nights to look after my own matters.
- Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends.
- He that will not stoop for a pin will never be worth a pound.
- After that to a bookseller’s and bought for the love of the binding three books.
Samuel Pepys was an English diarist, naval administrator, and Member of Parliament. He is now famous for the Diary
he kept for a decade as a young man. Pepys was able to sum up a scene or person in a few brilliant words. The book gives a picture of the official and upper-class life of Restoration London from 1660 to 1669. The Diary is made up of ‘1,250,000 words, filling six quarto volumes in the Pepys Library. It is far more than an ordinary record of its writer’s thoughts and actions; it is a supreme work of art, revealing on every page the capacity for selecting the small, as well as the large, essential that conveys the sense of life; and it is probably, after the Bible and James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the best bedside book in the English language.’
Source for Image: By John Hayls – Walthamstow Weekender (file), Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=210769
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