Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel Pepys

Gratitude is doing a lot of social work here. Pepys opens with "Thanks be to God" as both confession and alibi: the improvement he reports is moral, practical, and providential, neatly wrapping self-help in piety. It flatters the era's religious expectations while letting him claim agency without sounding vain. Pepys is always negotiating appearances, even in private, and this little burst of virtue reads like a man rehearsing the version of himself he wants to be.

The appeal is its accountant's cadence. "Better" arrives not as a halo but as a ledger: business minded, money saved, time reclaimed, fewer hours wasted with "idle company". The sentence stacks clauses the way he tracks expenses in his diary, turning sobriety into measurable returns. That accumulation is the rhetoric: it mimics sobriety itself, a tightening of life, fewer leaks in the day.

Context matters: Pepys is writing in Restoration London, where the drink-soaked sociability of taverns and office networks greased advancement and invited ruin. Wine isn't just a vice; it's a schedule, a class marker, a portal to gossip and temptation. His phrasing suggests ambivalence. "Since my leaving" implies an experiment, not a conversion; "idle company" is a moral judgment that also hints at loneliness, or at least the cost of opting out of conviviality.

The subtext is the modern one: self-discipline as status. Pepys isn't chasing purity. He's chasing control, competence, and the comforting feeling that his life can be optimized clause by clause.