Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeremy Collier

Idleness, Collier suggests, is not leisure but a kind of moral claustrophobia. The line lands like a small rebuke: when your days have no duties, no craft, no outward aim, you don’t become serenely self-sufficient-you become bored with yourself. That’s the sting. It assumes the self isn’t an endlessly entertaining companion; it needs shaping through work, service, and friction with the world.

As a late 17th-century Anglican clergyman (and a famously combative critic of the Restoration stage), Collier is speaking from a culture anxious about “vain” amusements and the social mess they leave behind. His target isn’t rest; it’s empty time unmoored from purpose, the sort of leisure the period often framed as a gateway to vice. The phrasing is canny because it avoids thunderous sermonizing and instead diagnoses a psychological consequence: you grow “tired” of your own company. Not guilty. Not damned. Just drained.

The subtext is almost modern: boredom is an indictment. If being alone with yourself feels unbearable, Collier implies, that’s evidence of an untrained inner life. Purpose, in this view, is less about productivity than about moral architecture. Work (broadly understood as vocation, obligation, calling) gives you a self you can actually stand to inhabit.

There’s also a social critique tucked in: people with nothing to do tend to make something of other people. Busyness becomes civic hygiene. In an era of coffeehouse gossip, pamphlet wars, and theatrical spectacle, Collier’s line doubles as a warning about what idleness turns into when it spills outward.