The Diary of Leonardo Da Vinci

Da Vinci never left the house without a tiny black notebook (among other things he was apparently the inventor of the Moleskin as well). He hung it from his belt and whenever something caught his eye or tickled his brain, he'd scribble it in this book. Wendy McNaughton has translated a sample page. How casually he proposes to draw Milan! More here.

commonplace

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art

-Virginia Woolf