Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeremy Collier

Collier frames reading as a kind of moral furniture: sturdy, quiet, and meant to hold you up when no one else is around. Coming from a late-17th/early-18th-century Anglican clergyman best known for scolding the theater’s “immorality,” the line carries a distinct pastoral agenda. Solitude, for Collier, isn’t romantic alienation; it’s a spiritual condition with risks. Left alone, the mind can curdle into vanity, temptation, self-pity, or restless distraction. Books become a disciplined companion, a way to keep the self from turning predatory on itself.

The phrasing is doing subtle work. “Support” treats literature less as entertainment than as scaffolding for inner life, suggesting that the reader is not sovereign but susceptible, in need of structure. Even sharper is “a burden to ourselves.” Collier’s theology assumes the self is not automatically a friend. The danger isn’t merely boredom; it’s self-occupation, the exhausting loop where conscience nags, desire agitates, and the imagination runs unsupervised. A book, especially the right kind of book, interrupts that loop and gives the mind something better to chew on.

There’s also a social subtext. In an era anxious about idleness and “vain” amusements, reading is sold as a respectable alternative to gossip, drink, and playgoing. It’s self-management that looks like leisure. Collier’s intent is less to celebrate solitude than to domesticate it: keep company with texts so you don’t become your own worst parishioner.