I pray God to keep me from being proud.

The line reads as a brief, private act of self-scrutiny: Pepys asks divine help against pride, implying he feels the temptation of self-satisfaction—often after professional success, social advancement, or moral “improvement.” In Pepys’s idiom, pride is not merely vanity but a spiritual danger that can distort judgment and conduct. The prayer also reflects the diary’s characteristic oscillation between worldly ambition and religious conscience: he records pleasures and achievements, then checks himself with penitential language. As a quotation, it captures the tension between self-making and self-discipline in a Restoration civil servant who measures his inner life as carefully as his public fortunes.