Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq reported from al-Zuhrī: “One of the calamities that befall knowledge is for the scholar to be left alone until his learning is lost.” ⦗1⦘

Abū Zurʿah narrated—through Nuʿaym ibn Ḥammād, Muḥammad ibn Thawr, and Maʿmar—from al-Zuhrī, who said: “Reading aloud to the scholar and listening from him are equal, God willing.”

ʿAbd al-Razzāq transmitted from Maʿmar, from al-Zuhrī, that he said: “When a gathering drags on, Satan secures for himself a share in it.” On one occasion Hishām settled his debt to the amount of eighty thousand dirhams; another report says seventeen thousand, and yet another says twenty thousand.

Al-Shāfiʿī said: Rajāʾ ibn Ḥaywah reproached al-Zuhrī for his extravagance, for he used to borrow on credit. ⦗2⦘ He told him, “I fear that these people may withhold what they possess from you, and you will have burdened yourself with mere hopes.” Al-Zuhrī promised that he would cut back, but later Rajāʾ passed by him while he had set out food and arranged trays of honey. Rajāʾ stopped and said, “Abū Bakr, this is not what we parted upon!” Al-Zuhrī replied, “Come down, for a generous man is not disciplined by experience.” ⦗3⦘

Someone composed verses on this very theme:
Within his fingertips are clouds of bounty,
Whose rain is gleaming silver and gold.
In hardship he says, “If ease returns once more,
I shall curtail some of what I give and grant.”
But when the days of prosperity come back to him,
You see his wealth dispersed among the people.

Al-Wāqidī stated: Al-Zuhrī was born in 58 AH—at the end of Muʿāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān’s caliphate, the same year in which ʿĀʾishah, the Prophet’s wife, died. ⦗4⦘ In 124 AH he travelled to his estates—three in all ⦗5⦘—at Shaghb and Badā ⦗6⦘, where he remained, fell ill, and died. He instructed that he be buried by the roadside; his death occurred on the seventeenth of Ramaḍān that year, at the age of seventy-five. They said of him: he was trustworthy, and abundant in ḥadith and knowledge.