14 Famous People Who Kept Journals (And What They Wrote)

Famous people who journal rarely use the page in the same way. Some keep diaries. Others fill notebooks, commonplace books, sketchbooks, work logs, or private pages where they can think without an audience. A journal, in this broader sense, is a place to observe, test ideas, rehearse beliefs, track progress, and remember what the mind would otherwise lose.

I’ve spent years reading the journals of successful people and historically significant writers, artists, scientists, and leaders. What interests me is not the suggestion that journaling automatically creates success. It does not. It is the way these pages reveal the private practices behind public work.

Below are 14 famous people who kept journals, what each person put on the page, and one part of the practice you can borrow. Every example also links to a complete, research-backed profile if you want to go deeper.

In short: the best journal is not the most beautiful or disciplined one. It is the one designed for the kind of thinking you need to do.

Key takeaway: Famous journal keepers rarely use one format. Steal the job of the page – decision log, sketchbook, commonplace book, work notes – not the celebrity brand around it.

14 Journal Methods at a Glance

Use this table as a menu: fourteen people, the journal form they used, what it helped them do, and one practice you can borrow this week without copying their whole life.

1. Leonardo da Vinci – A Notebook for Curiosity

Leonardo’s surviving notebook pages move freely between anatomy, machines, water, light, errands, and questions – a model for keeping a curiosity notebook instead of a perfect diary.

Leonardo da Vinci’s thousands of surviving notebook pages move freely between anatomy, machines, water, light, geometry, faces, errands, and questions he wanted to investigate. The pages are not organized like a finished book. They look more like curiosity caught in motion.

That range is the lesson. Leonardo did not wait for an idea to fit a category before recording it. A sketch could sit beside a shopping list. A question could remain unanswered for years. The notebook gave observation somewhere to land before he knew whether it would become useful.

If your journal feels scattered, Leonardo offers a reassuring possibility: scattered is not the same as pointless. A notebook can become coherent over time because the same questions keep returning.

Read the full guide to Leonardo da Vinci’s journals and observational practice.

2. Albert Einstein – Thinking Through the Pencil

Einstein’s working notebooks show equations attempted, revised, abandoned, and restarted – useful because they preserve the messy path, not only the tidy answer.

Albert Einstein’s working notebooks show equations attempted, revised, abandoned, and approached again. They are valuable precisely because they do not present a smooth path to the answer. They preserve the wrong turns that polished explanations usually remove.

This is journaling as active thought rather than personal reflection. A difficult idea becomes easier to examine once it is outside your head. You can draw it, challenge it, find the missing step, and notice where an assumption fails.

I use this approach whenever a problem begins looping in my mind. Instead of asking the journal to give me an answer, I ask it to hold the problem still long enough for me to see it.

Explore Einstein’s private journals and thinking habits.

3. Thomas Edison – 3,500 Notebooks of Working Memory

Thomas Edison and his laboratory teams produced roughly 3,500 notebooks filled with experiments, sketches, test results, supplies, and ideas. The impressive part is not only the number. It is how much ordinary work the collection preserves.

Edison treated the notebook as external memory. A result that looked unimportant today might matter next month. A failed experiment could prevent the same mistake later. A small observation could combine with another one and become a new direction.

Most entries in a useful work journal will never feel profound. That is normal. The habit works because it makes the everyday work retrievable, giving the occasional insight a much larger base from which to emerge.

See what Edison’s 3,500 notebooks reveal about innovation.

4. Bruce Lee – Training, Philosophy, and Identity

Bruce Lee’s journals combined training notes, reading, philosophical fragments, and written statements about the life he intended to build. The pages reveal someone practicing both physical technique and self-definition.

What I find most useful is the movement between the concrete and the personal. A training detail could sit beside a larger question about discipline, art, or identity. Lee did not separate the work he was doing from the person he hoped the work would help him become.

You can borrow this without writing grand affirmations. At the end of a work or training entry, add one sentence: “This is teaching me to become someone who…” The answer often shows why the practice matters beyond today’s result.

Read more about Bruce Lee’s training journals, affirmations, and philosophy.

5. Benjamin Franklin – The 13 Virtues Tracker

Benjamin Franklin built a pocket-sized system around 13 virtues he wanted to practice. His grid paired the virtues with the days of the week, and he marked faults as he noticed them. He concentrated on one virtue at a time, then repeated the cycle.

The system is famous because it is tidy. Franklin’s own account is more interesting because he admitted how often he failed, especially at order. The page did not transform him into a flawless person. It made his behavior harder to ignore.

That distinction matters. A tracker becomes discouraging when every mark feels like a verdict. It becomes useful when the marks are information. The goal is not a perfect page. It is a clearer view of the pattern you want to change.

Try Benjamin Franklin’s journaling method and 13 virtues practice.

6. Martin Luther King Jr. – Rehearsing Convictions on Paper

Martin Luther King Jr.’s surviving writings include sermon drafts, class notes, letters, marginalia, and reflective passages. These are not one continuous diary, but together they show a long practice of testing language and ideas before bringing them to a public audience.

The lesson is not that private writing makes a difficult public moment easy. It is that writing helps you discover what you actually believe before pressure asks you to say it clearly. King’s intellectual development, including the influence of mentors such as Benjamin Mays, unfolded through sustained reading, note-taking, revision, and reflection.

A journal can be a rehearsal room for conviction. Write the difficult explanation before the meeting, conversation, or decision. You may find that the words become steadier because you have already met them on the page.

Study the lessons inside Martin Luther King Jr.’s journals and writings.

7. Richard Feynman – A Notebook for What You Do Not Know

Richard Feynman’s notebooks were places to work, not merely places to record completed work. He collected questions, redrew problems, explained ideas in plain language, and used diagrams as part of the reasoning itself.

One especially useful habit was keeping track of subjects he did not understand. That reverses the way many of us treat uncertainty. Instead of hiding the gap, the notebook makes it the next object of curiosity.

Start a page called “Things I Don’t Know About.” Add questions without demanding immediate answers. When one keeps returning, explain what you currently understand as if teaching it to someone else. The weak part of the explanation usually shows you what to investigate next.

Learn how to use Feynman’s notebook method for questions, drawings, and clearer thinking.

8. W.E.B. Du Bois – Notes That Became Evidence

W.E.B. Du Bois used notebooks, schedules, tables, maps, and hand-drawn charts as research infrastructure. His visualizations for the 1900 Paris Exposition transformed data about Black life in the United States into an argument viewers could see. More than 60 of those charts are preserved in the Library of Congress collection.

Du Bois’s example expands the meaning of journaling. A notebook does not have to describe how you feel about the day. It can gather observations carefully enough that a pattern becomes visible and a claim becomes defensible.

If you are trying to understand your work, health, community, or time, draw the information before writing a conclusion. A simple timeline, tally, or chart may reveal something prose has been hiding.

Explore W.E.B. Du Bois’s data notebooks and hand-drawn charts.

9. Frederick Douglass – Writing as Self-Education

Frederick Douglass’s relationship with notebooks began under slavery, when learning to read and write was itself an act of resistance. He copied letters into spare spaces, studied the marks made by others, and used every available surface as part of his education.

Across his life, the record widened. Copybooks, account books, scrapbooks, autobiographies, and dated notes helped him preserve evidence, organize public work, and revise the story of a life that others had tried to control. Calling all of this a conventional diary would be too narrow. It was a writing practice built around agency.

The transferable lesson is not to imitate the circumstances. It is to treat writing as an instrument of learning. Copy a difficult passage by hand. Define the unfamiliar words. Then explain the idea without looking back.

Read how Frederick Douglass used copybooks and notebooks to teach himself.

10. Susan Sontag – 100 Notebooks of an Unfinished Self

Susan Sontag filled around 100 notebooks with reading lists, films, quotations, observations, vocabulary, ambitions, and fragments that did not yet belong anywhere else. The notebooks were crowded rather than curated. They held intellectual work and ordinary life together.

What makes them useful is their permission to remain unfinished. Sontag did not require every note to become an essay or every list to prove its value. The notebook could store a possible future self alongside the person she already was.

This is a good remedy for the pressure to make every page meaningful. Keep the fragment. Save the sentence you cannot use yet. List what you want to learn. A notebook can carry material until you have grown into the person who knows what to do with it.

See what Susan Sontag’s 100 notebooks teach about lists, ideas, and identity.

11. Ralph Waldo Emerson – 263 Indexed Notebooks

Ralph Waldo Emerson kept 263 notebooks across much of his life. They functioned as commonplace books: places to gather quotations, observations, reading notes, original sentences, and material that might later find its way into lectures and essays.

The crucial feature was retrieval. Emerson named notebooks, marked his own thoughts, and indexed material so an idea recorded years earlier could become useful again. The practice was not only collection. It was a long conversation with his earlier reading and thinking.

If your notes disappear into a stack of pages, borrow the indexing habit. Reserve the first or last pages for topics. Add a page number whenever a theme returns. The index does not need to be complete to make the notebook more valuable.

Tour Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 263 notebooks and commonplace-book system.

12. Pablo Picasso – 175 Sketchbooks of Repetition

Pablo Picasso left 175 sketchbooks filled with studies, variations, false starts, and subjects drawn again and again. The sketchbook was not a showroom for finished talent. It was where repetition could remain visible.

That makes Picasso’s pages useful even if you do not draw. We often treat repetition as evidence that the first attempt failed. In a working journal, repetition is how an idea changes. The tenth version contains information the first version could not.

Choose one subject and approach it five times on five pages. Draw it, describe it, argue against it, simplify it, or change the point of view. Do not tear out the awkward attempts. The sequence is the record of the thinking.

Look inside Pablo Picasso’s 175 sketchbooks and practice of creative repetition.

13. Henry David Thoreau – Two Million Words of Attention

Henry David Thoreau’s journal grew to roughly two million words. It held natural observations, drafts, philosophical questions, weather, walks, and the slow development of ideas that later appeared in his published work.

The sequence matters: walk first, notice closely, then write. Thoreau did not ask the journal to manufacture an interesting life from a chair. The page sharpened his attention because he expected to return and describe what he had seen.

Try a smaller version. Take a ten-minute walk without headphones. When you return, record three details that would have escaped you on an ordinary day. Observation is a journaling skill, and like any skill, it improves when the page gives it a reason to practice.

Follow Thoreau’s two-million-word journal and daily observation practice.

14. Virginia Woolf – A 26-Year Writing Workshop

Virginia Woolf kept a diary for 26 years. She used it to reflect on daily life, rehearse sentences, respond to books, and think through her own writing while novels and essays were still in progress.

For Woolf, the diary’s looseness was part of its value. It could catch ideas that a more polished form would exclude. The writing did not have to be ready for readers, which gave style and thought room to surprise her.

Anyone who creates for an audience needs a place that is not performing for one. Keep one page, file, or notebook where the work can be rough, contradictory, and incomplete. That private space is not separate from the finished work. It is often where the finished work learns how to begin.

Read the lessons in Virginia Woolf’s 26-year diary.

What Famous People Who Journal Have in Common

The 14 practices look different, but four patterns repeat.

• They used the page to do something. Einstein solved, Du Bois measured, Picasso practiced, Woolf experimented, and Franklin tracked. The journal was active, not decorative.
• They kept imperfect material. Wrong equations, awkward drawings, failed experiments, unfinished lists, and repeated reminders remained part of the record.
• The format followed the purpose. A grid worked for Franklin. Open pages worked for Leonardo. Charts worked for Du Bois. Sketchbooks worked for Picasso. There is no single correct journal structure.
• They returned long enough for the pages to compound. One entry rarely changed the work. Years of observations, revisions, and questions created something none of the pages could create alone.

This is the clearest lesson I have found among famous people who journal: consistency matters, but useful consistency is easier when the notebook has a job.

Choose One Method to Try

If you want a faster match between these methods and a modern page format, start with how to choose a journal style.

You do not need to combine all 14 systems. Pick the one that matches what you need right now.

1. To notice more: try Leonardo or Thoreau. Record questions and concrete details.
2. To understand a hard problem: try Einstein or Feynman. Explain, diagram, and test your thinking.
3. To improve a practice: try Edison, Franklin, Du Bois, or Picasso. Log the work and look for patterns.
4. To develop your voice or values: try Bruce Lee, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan Sontag, or Virginia Woolf. Use the page to rehearse ideas before sharing them.
5. To build a personal knowledge system: try Frederick Douglass or Emerson. Copy, collect, index, and revisit what teaches you.

Start with one sentence or one observation a day. If you want a practical setup, use my step-by-step guide to building a journaling habit that sticks. If you are deciding whether the practice is worth your time, begin with the science-backed benefits of journaling.

The notebooks above are not museum pieces to admire from a distance. They are 14 different demonstrations of the same possibility: a page can become a place where better attention, clearer thought, and meaningful work begin.

More Journals Worth Studying

The fourteen above get a full profile because their methods are the easiest to borrow. They are not the whole list. I have kept reading since, and each study below works from the surviving notebooks rather than the legend around them.

Writers at work on the page

• Jane Austen’s teenage notebooks and surviving drafts – around 1,100 pages of her manuscripts survive, and the crossings-out show a finished voice that was made by going back, not by arriving.
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein draft notebooks – she was eighteen, Percy’s edits crowd in from the margins, and the diary entry for the day the book came back rejected is three words long.
• The Brontë children’s hand-sewn little books – Charlotte’s 1830 play runs to sixteen bound pages measuring 49 by 32 millimetres, written in a hand deliberately too small for adults to read.
• The Brothers Grimm and their 700 annotated books – they did not gather fairy tales by wandering the countryside. They read, annotated, and indexed themes on the inside covers so they could find them again.
• Walt Whitman’s homemade notebooks and scrapbooks – he stitched booklets out of scrap paper and carried loose sheets in his coat pocket. In his own marked-up copy of Leaves of Grass, only 34 of 456 pages are clean.
• Joan Didion on why she kept a notebook – her argument is that the point of an entry is not accuracy but how it felt at the time, and that the reader you are writing for is the person you will become.

Notebooks kept for no audience at all

• Marcus Aurelius writing Meditations to himself – a private notebook he never titled and never prepared for readers, repeating the same handful of instructions because they kept not sticking.
• Samuel Johnson’s diary of failed resolutions – “To rise early” returns across decades, and on his 55th birthday, with the Dictionary already behind him, he wrote that he had done nothing.
• Samuel Pepys and nine years of shorthand – roughly 3,100 pages written for no reader, which is why he admitted going back to sleep during the Great Fire and burying his Parmesan cheese in the garden.
• The two published versions of Anaïs Nin’s diary – the same years exist in print twice, once with her husband edited out and once with him restored. A diary is not automatically the truth.
• Octavia Butler’s affirmations and quotas – on the inside cover of a 1988 notebook she wrote “So be it! See to it!” above a list of futures that had not happened yet, then set a writing schedule on the facing pages.
• Frida Kahlo’s illustrated diary – 170 pages kept from 1944 to 1954, with around 70 watercolours, where the writing and the drawing are the same material.

Thinking, drawing, and building on paper

• Darwin’s “I think” sketch in Notebook B – in July 1837 he wrote two hedging words above a stubby branching tree, then spent another twenty-two years making the argument strong enough to publish.
• Antoni Gaudí’s one surviving notebook – more than 6,000 items burned in 1936. What is left is the Manuscrit de Reus, in which he numbered nine working principles at twenty-six, before he had any commissions to apply them to.
• The sketchbooks behind Winnie-the-Pooh – E.H. Shepard’s first drawing of Pooh came out wrong, so he swapped models and drew his son’s teddy bear instead. His archive is full of sheets marked “not used.”
• Beethoven’s conversation notebooks – 139 survive, and most of the handwriting is not his. As his hearing failed, visitors wrote their side while he answered aloud, so the pages record what came in rather than what he concluded.

Records that changed something, and one that indicts its keeper

• Florence Nightingale’s notes, from commonplace book to diagram – she was copying passages at sixteen and, by 1858, publishing the wedge diagram that made preventable army deaths impossible to argue with.
• Thomas Jefferson’s notebooks, read all the way through – he logged his garden for fifty-eight years and took roughly 19,000 weather readings. The same careful hand listed the people he enslaved. A record is evidence, not a character reference.
• The notebooks behind the civil rights movement – Frederick Douglass taught himself to write in the blank spaces of someone else’s copy book, and Du Bois, King, and Audre Lorde each worked a public argument out privately on paper first.

If you only have time for one, start with the person whose problem sounds most like the one in front of you.

If these notebook lessons sparked a practice you want to keep, join the free Journaling Habit newsletter for short examples and prompts by email.

Want the habit path before studying famous notebooks? Start at Start Here.

For a practical protocol based on Einstein’s notebooks, open Einstein’s writing notebook method.

For a weekly habit chart inspired by Franklin, open the Benjamin Franklin habit tracker.

For notebooks kept together rather than alone, see couples who journaled together.

The verified affirmation list now has its own short guide: Bruce Lee’s Affirmations.

More notebook methods on the site

• Morning pages
• Five-minute journal DIY
• Evening journal
• Brain dump journaling
• Dream journal
• Future-self journaling
• 30-day journaling challenge
• Travel journal
• What makes a great journal entry
• Journaling for mental health
• Journaling through hard times
• Rockefeller’s Ledger A – a money diary from 1855