John Wesley

The name most people meet first through a quote about doing all the good you can belongs to a clergyman who spent his working life organising a revival inside the Church of England. That movement became known as Methodism, and Wesley was its principal leader — not a lone preacher but the figure around whom the whole thing was structured.

He was born at Epworth in 1703 and worked as a cleric, a theologian and an evangelist, three roles he never really separated. The societies he set up were the practical core of what he did: small organised groups rather than a loose following. Those societies outlasted him and became the dominant form of the independent Methodist movement that continued after his death in 1791.

He was also a diarist, which is part of why his words still circulate. A man who wrote steadily about his own days and his own thinking leaves behind material that later readers can quote directly, and much of what gets shared today comes from that habit of putting things down on paper rather than from any single sermon or book.