What Pepys, Darwin, Tolstoy and Anne Frank wrote in their diaries: 8 entries that outlived their authors

The most famous diary in English ended because of eyesight. For nine years Samuel Pepys wrote everything down in shorthand: his work at the Navy Office, the plague, the fire, fights with his wife, what he had for dinner. On 31 May 1669 he wrote that his eyes could no longer take the pen, and closed the book. He was thirty-six. He lived another thirty-four years and never picked the diary up again.

I collected eight entries from people whose diaries are still read centuries later. Ordinary entries, with a date and whatever happened that day, chosen without any filter for wisdom. Every quote is checked against an edition; the list is at the bottom. Pepys and Darwin are quoted as printed; Tolstoy and Kafka are my translations.

2 September 1666. Pepys wakes up to a fire and goes back to sleep

Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the backside of Marke-lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep.

That is how the entry on the Great Fire of London begins, the fire that would destroy thirteen thousand houses in four days. At this point Pepys has no idea he is writing history. He knows that the maid Jane stayed up late cooking for tomorrow's feast, and that the fire looks far away.

Later in the same entry he is on the Thames, watching people throw their belongings into boats, and he notices the birds: "the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down." That sentence about pigeons has outlived the whole description of the fire. He wrote what he saw, not what he was supposed to feel.

31 May 1669. Pepys closes the diary

And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand.

He tries to bargain with himself: let his people keep it in longhand, and he will leave a margin for a note in shorthand "here and there". Nothing came of it. The last sentence of the entry compares closing the diary to watching himself go into his grave.

I reread this every time I catch myself thinking "nothing to write today". Pepys had a reason to stop. Most of us do not.

17 September 1835. Darwin in the Galápagos and the "ugly little flowers"

These islands appear paradises for the whole family of Reptiles. [...] When on shore I proceeded to botanize & obtained 10 different flowers; but such insignificant, ugly little flowers, as would better become an Arctic than a Tropical country. The birds are Strangers to Man & think him as innocent as their countrymen the huge Tortoises.

Darwin is twenty-six, in his fourth year at sea, and does not yet know these islands will become the main argument of his theory. There are no revelations in the diary. There is fishing that "makes all hands very merry", a failed attempt to catch a tortoise, and black lizards somebody on board called "imps of darkness".

The conclusions came twenty years later, in a book. The diary kept the raw material for him: how many, which kind, what colour. An entry about a "boring" day works the same way. You do not know now which detail you will need in a year.

20 June 1837. Victoria, first day on the throne

Since it has pleased Providence to place me in this station, I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty towards my country; I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced, but I am sure that very few have more real good will and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.

She is eighteen. She was woken that morning to be told the king had died. The entry is long, businesslike and very young at the same time: she notes who came and at what hour, and in the middle of it writes this promise to herself.

Victoria's journals were later edited by her daughter Beatrice, and part of the originals was burned. What survived is still read by historians. The lesson is simple and uncomfortable: a diary outlives you, and you will not be the one editing it. That is why the first thing I check in any journal app is where the entries live and who else can read them.

17 March 1847. Tolstoy starts a diary in a hospital ward

It is now six days since I entered the clinic, and six days that I have been almost pleased with myself. [...] Here I am completely alone, nobody disturbs me, here I have no servants, nobody helps me; consequently nothing external influences my reason and memory, and my activity must necessarily develop.

Tolstoy's first entry. He is eighteen, a student at Kazan University, in a clinic with an illness he names bluntly and I will leave out. He starts the diary out of forced quiet, not happiness. In the margin of the same notebook he later adds a line I would hang over any list of goals: "It is easier to write ten volumes of philosophy than to put a single principle into practice."

He would keep a diary for sixty-three years, with gaps. This is how it began: a dull ward and an attempt to work out what was happening to him.

2 August 1914. Kafka, one line

Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.

That is the whole entry. Two sentences quoted for a century, usually as an example of detachment. I read it differently. It is the most honest same-day record of a huge event you can make: the world news, and what you actually did. He did not know this was "the start of the First World War". For him it was a Sunday, and he went to the swimming school.

Many people spend years looking for permission to write one line a day. Kafka gave it to himself.

20 April 1919. Woolf decides what a diary should be

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.

She goes on to compare it to "some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through". Woolf is thirty-seven, two novels behind her, and she is writing down the rule anyone who has abandoned a diary over a too-pretty notebook will sign: you have to be able to throw anything into it.

She also shows the other side. Her diaries are full of entries about not writing, being tired, everything going badly. Twenty years later, "Mrs Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse" grew out of that hold-all, bad-day entries included.

20 June 1942. Anne Frank: "paper has more patience than people"

Paper has more patience than people.

The diary is five days old when she writes this; it was a present for her thirteenth birthday on 12 June. Anne explains why she needs a notebook when she has parents, a sister and about thirty acquaintances: there is nobody she can really talk to. Three weeks later the family will go into hiding, and the diary will be her only confidant for two years.

I thought for a long time about including this one: too famous, too heavy a context. I kept it because the sentence is exact on its own. Paper does not interrupt, does not get tired, does not repeat things to other people. That is precisely what people come to a journal for in 2026, except the paper is not always paper any more.

What the eight entries have in common

None of them was written "for history". Pepys went back to sleep. Darwin called the flowers ugly. Kafka went swimming. They all wrote on the same day, briefly or at length, about what happened rather than what it meant.

And almost every diary on this list started or stopped for a mundane reason: illness, a birthday present, failing eyes. Yours does not have to start with a big decision either. One line tonight is enough. If you do not know where to begin, here is how to start and not quit after a week, and if you want to write about dreams, those have rules of their own: a dream journal without mysticism.