“If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.”
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer
Letter to James Boswell, October 27, 1779, p. 433
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol III
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3
“Be not solitary, be not idle.”
Section 4, member 2, subsection 6, Cure of Despair by Physic, Good Counsel, Comforts, etc.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III
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Robert Burton111
English scholar 1577–1640Related quotes
“Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.”
Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer
Context: Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together. I knew a lot of writers in London and many of them were award-winning writers and many of them were award-winning, respectable writers. And the trouble with being an award-winning, respectable writer is that you probably are not making a living.
If you write one well-reviewed, well-respected, not bad selling, but not a bestseller list book every three years, which you sell for a whopping 30,000 pounds, that's still going to average out to 10,000 pounds a year and you will make more managing a McDonald's. With overtime you'd probably make more working in a McDonald's. So there were incredibly well-respected, award-winning senior writers who, to make ends meet, were writing film novelizations and TV novelizations under pen names that they were desperately embarrassed about and didn't want anybody to know about.
January magazine interview (2002)
“Transferring the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm makes the solitary worm social.”
Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist
In Search of Memory (2006)
Context: Cori Bargmann... has studied two variants of C. elegans... The only difference between the two is one amino acid in an otherwise shared receptor protein. Transferring the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm makes the solitary worm social.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter
"The Jelly-Bean"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
“People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.”
Leo Rosten (1908–1997) American writer
“Writing is a strange and solitary activity.”
Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer
From Nobel Lecture (2014)
“A solitary man is a God, or a beast.”
Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher
The Sayings of the Wise (1555)
