Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Pepys

Pepys delivers the line like a confession with a smirk, and that’s exactly why it lands: it’s a self-portrait of a man who thinks he’s in charge of his day until pleasure walks into the room. “I cannot but give way to” is doing double duty. It sounds like gallantry and helplessness at once, as if temptation is a force of nature and Pepys is merely reporting the weather. That rhetorical shrug is the subtext: desire is framed not as a choice but as an inevitability, a neat moral loophole for a diarist who prides himself on meticulous accounting of time, money, and reputation.

The pairing is revealing. Music represents cultivated refinement in Restoration London - a marker of taste, sociability, and class mobility. “Woman” (not “women,” not a name) is more bluntly transactional: an appetite, a category. Put together, they sketch the Restoration ideal of the successful man: diligent in public, indulgent in private, fluent in art and flirtation. Pepys’s genius is that he doesn’t sanitize the contradiction; he stages it.

Context sharpens the edge. Pepys was a civil servant climbing through the Navy Office, living in an age that prized wit, theatre, and sensuality after Puritan austerity. His diary is full of resolutions to be better - and the eager failures that follow. This line isn’t just about distraction; it’s about how “business” (duty, ambition, Protestant self-discipline) gets constantly renegotiated by the lure of pleasure. Pepys writes it down because he wants the record to show both the lapse and the charm of the lapse. The honesty is strategic: self-knowledge as entertainment, and entertainment as self-justification.