Samuel Pepys Quotes (1633-1703)

“But Lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange.”

“"Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that You shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to Your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. "Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun’s radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobby stones hidden in our coat-pockets remind us that we are all earth, and that we are sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr. Waterhouse?” “Only, Amen!” “Amen. Damn me, I am late for my next conspiracy! Godspeed, Daniel.””

“A most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others.”

“Mr. Chetwind fell commending of "Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity," as the best book, and the only one that made him a Christian, which puts me upon the buying of it, which I will do shortly.”

“I sent for some dinner and there dined, Mrs. Margaret Pen being by, to whom I had spoke to go along with us to a play this afternoon, and then to the King's Theatre, where we saw 'Midsummer's Night's Dream', which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”

“Thence with Creed to Gresham College, where I had been by Mr. Povy the last week proposed to be admitted a member; and was this day admitted... But it is a most acceptable thing to hear their discourse, and see their experiments; which were this day upon the nature of fire... Above all, Mr. Boyle to-day was at the meeting, and above him Mr. Hooke, who is the most, and promises the least, of any man in the world that ever I saw.”

“I am mad in love with my Lord Chancellor, for he do comprehend and speak out well, and with the greatest easiness and authority that ever I saw man in my life. I did never observe how much easier a man do speak, when he knows all the company to be below him, than in him; for, though he spoke, indeed, excellent well, yet his manner and freedom of doing it, as if he played with it, and was informing only all the rest of the company, was mighty pretty.”