Thoughts on { The Anatomy of Melancholy | Robert Burton (1621)

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy / Frontispiece for the 1638 edition

“Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.”

“What cannot be cured must be endured.”

“Every man for himself, the devil for all.”

“No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast,
as [love] can do with a single thread.”

“That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their
knowledge by books,I mine by melancholizing.”

“He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow.”

“[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.”

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

“Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, he said, was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.”

 James Boswell, in The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791