'Tis now many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than myself, and that I have only pried into and studied myself: or, if I study any other thing, 'tis to apply it to or rather in myself.

And yet I do not think it a fault, if, as others do by other much less profitable sciences, I communicate what I have learned in this, though I am not very well pleased with my own progress.

There is no description so difficult, nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of a man's self: and withal, a man must curl his hair and set out and adjust himself, to appear in public: now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon my own description.

Custom has made all speaking of a man's self vicious, and positively interdicts it, in hatred to the boasting that seems inseparable from the testimony men give of themselves: "In vitium ducit culpae fuga." ["The avoiding a mere fault often leads us into a greater." Or: "The escape from a fault leads into a vice" -- Horace, De Arte Poetics, verse 31.] Instead of blowing the child's nose, this is to take his nose off altogether.

I think the remedy worse than the disease.