When Boswell confessed to Johnson that he feared some things he was en — Diary

"The diary ... is the unfathomable document of a life never lived, the book of a life in whose time everything that we experienced inadequately is transformed into experience perfected."

"Diaries have been a rich source of material for me. Not the events recorded in such journals, but the mental attitude, the moral standards, and the feelings of people at the time. It is all right to imagine, but the imagination must have a takeoff point, it must have a basis in fact."

"For practical rules for the culture of the intellect perhaps none can be given that are good for all but there are two expedients that may do such good service to very many young men that I will venture to name them."

"If your journal consists of the best moments of your life and reading, then rereading it will be like walking a high mountain trail that goes from peak to peak without the intervening descent into the trough of routine. Just reading such a journal of high points will tighten your strings and raise your pitch."

"The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense."

"When events and circumstances which have influenced us pass away in the course of time, we are unable to bring back and renew the particular mood or state of feeling which they aroused in us: but we can remember what we were led to say and do in regard to them; and thus form, as it were, the result, expression and measure of those events. We should, therefore, be careful to preserve the memory of our thoughts at important points in our life; and herein lies the great advantage of keeping a journal."