quality:corruption
Personality and activities

Wesley travelled widely, generally on horseback, preaching two or three times each day. Stephen Tomkins writes that " rode 250,000 miles, gave away 30,000 pounds,... and preached more than 40,000 sermons... " He formed societies, opened chapels, examined and commissioned preachers, administered aid charities, prescribed for the sick, helped to pioneer the use of electric shock for the treatment of illness, and superintended orphanages and schools (including Kingswood School).

Wesley practised a vegetarian diet and in later life abstained from wine for health reasons. He wrote, "thanks be to God, since the time I gave up flesh meals and wine I have been delivered from all physical ills". Wesley warned against the dangers of alcohol abuse in his famous sermon, The Use of Money, and in his letter to an alcoholic. In his sermon, On Public Diversions, Wesley says: "You see the wine when it sparkles in the cup, and are going to drink of it. I tell you there is poison in it! and, therefore, beg you to throw it away". These statements against alcohol use largely concerned "hard liquors and spirits" rather than the low-alcohol beer, which was often safer to drink than the contaminated water of that time. Methodist churches became pioneers in the teetotal temperance movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, and later it became de rigueur in British Methodism.

He attended music concerts, and was especially an admirer of Charles Avison. After attending a performance in Bristol Cathedral in 1758, Wesley recorded in his journal: "I went to the cathedral to hear Mr. Handel's Messiah. I doubt if that congregation was ever so serious at a sermon as they were during this performance. In many places, especially several of the choruses, it exceeded my expectation."

He is described as "rather under the medium height, well proportioned, strong, with a bright eye, a clear complexion, and a saintly, intellectual face". Though Wesley favoured celibacy rather than marital bond, he married very unhappily in 1751, at the age of 48, to a widow, Mary Vazeille, described as "a well-to-do widow and mother of four children." The couple had no children. John Singleton writes: "By 1758 she had left him—unable to cope, it is said, with the competition for his time and devotion presented by the ever-burgeoning Methodist movement. Molly, as she was known, was to return and leave him again on several occasions before their final separation." Wesley wryly reported in his journal, "I did not forsake her, I did not dismiss her, I will not recall her."

In 1770, at the death of George Whitefield, Wesley wrote a memorial sermon which praised Whitefield's admirable qualities and acknowledged the two men's differences: "There are many doctrines of a less essential nature... In these we may think and let think; we may ' agree to disagree.' But, meantime, let us hold fast the essentials..." Wesley may have been the first to use "agree to disagree" in print—in the modern sense of tolerating differences—though he himself attributed the saying to Whitefield, and it had appeared in other senses previously.

Wesley was gravely ill during a visit to Lisburn in Ireland in June 1775. He stayed at the home of a leading Methodist, Henrietta Gayer, where he recovered.