Top 63 Robert Burton Quotes
#1. There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.
Scott Stossel
#2. Almost in every kingdom the most ancient families have been at first princes' bastards.
Robert Burton
#3. Employment, which Galen calls 'Nature's Physician,' is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.
Robert A. Burton
#4. We can make mayors and officers every year, but not scholars.
Robert Burton
#6. Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him in particular all his life long.
Robert Burton
#8. The eyes are the harbingers of love, and the first step of love is sight.
Robert Burton
#9. A good conscience is a continual feast, but a galled conscience is as great a torment as can possibly happen, a still baking oven (so Pierius in his Hieroglyph compares it), another hell.
Robert Burton
#10. What is life, when wanting love? Night without a morning; love's the cloudless summer sun, nature gay adorning.
Robert Burton
#11. Wine is strong, the king is strong, women are strong, but truth overcometh all things.
Robert Burton
#12. One was never married, and that's his hell; another is, and that's his plague.
Robert Burton
#13. Some women like to treat a man like a piece of bubble gum. The poor sap thinks everything's fine. And it is - until the taste runs out. Then she'll just spit him out the car window of her life and never look back.
Robert Burton Robinson
#14. A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
Robert Burton
#16. We love neither God nor our neighbor as we should. Our love in spiritual things is "too defective, in worldly things too excessive, there is a jar in both." We love the world too much; God too little; our neighbor not at all, or for our own ends.
Robert Burton
#17. that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.
Robert Burton
#18. The history of science is the back-and-forth movement of trial-and-error advances and retreats, punctuated by moments of brilliance and marred by periods of excess.
Robert A. Burton
#19. Let thy fortune be what it will, 'tis thy mind alone that makes thee poor or rich, miserable or happy.
Robert Burton
#20. Every schoolboy hath that famous testament of Grunnius Corocotta Porcellus at his fingers end.
Robert A. Burton
#21. It is most true, stylus virum arguit, - our style betrays us.
Robert A. Burton
#22. Tobacco, divine, rare superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.
Robert A. Burton
#23. Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, rivel them up like old apples, make them as so many Anatomies.
Robert A. Burton
#25. Seneca thinks the gods are well pleased when they see great men contending with adversity.
Robert A. Burton
#28. Compassion, empathy, and humility can only arise out of recognizing that our common desires are differently expressed.
Robert A. Burton
#29. That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.
Robert Burton
#30. If heaven be so fair,the sun so fair, how much fairer shall He be that made them fair? For by the greatness and beauty of the creatures, proportionally the maker of them is seen.
Robert Burton
#31. If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled.
Robert Burton
#32. I would desire to have no other prison than a library, and to be chained together with as many good authors.
Robert Burton
#34. No rule is so general, which admits not some exception.
Robert Burton
#35. If you like not my writing, go read something else.
Robert Burton
#36. Worldly wealth is the Devil's bait; and those whose minds feed upon riches recede, in general, from real happiness, in proportion as their stores increase, as the moon, when she is fullest, is farthest from the sun.
Robert Burton
#38. To enlarge or illustrate this power and effect of love is to set a candle in the sun.
Robert Burton
#39. Temperance is a bridle of gold; he, who uses it rightly, is more like a god than a man.
Robert A. Burton
#42. A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself.
Robert Burton
#43. Our mental limitations prevent us from accepting our mental limitations.
Robert A. Burton
#46. As a fat body is more subject to diseases, so are rich men to absurdities and fooleries, to many casualties and cross inconveniences.
Robert Burton
#47. If you have no dreams, you shall live within them
Robert Burton
#48. Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.
Robert A. Burton
#49. Certainty is not biologically possible. We must learn (and teach our children) to tolerate the unpleasantness of uncertainty. Science has given us the language and tools of probabilities. We have methods for analyzing and ranking opinion according to their likelihood of correctness. That is enough.
Robert A. Burton
#50. Hope and patience are two sovereign remedies for all, the surest reposals, the softest cushions to lean on in adversity.
Robert A. Burton
#51. The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves.
Robert Burton
#52. In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people?
Burton Silverman
#54. No Centaurs here, or Gorgons look to find,
My subject is of man, and human kind.
Robert Burton
#55. [T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.
Robert Burton
#56. I would advise him that is actually melancholy not to read this tract of Symptoms, lest he disquiet or make himself for a time worse, and more melancholy than he was before.
Robert Burton
#57. They are proud in humility, proud that they are not proud.
Robert A. Burton
#58. No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast, as [love] can do with a single thread.
Robert Burton
#60. Old friends become bitter enemies on a sudden for toys and small offenses.
Robert Burton
#61. It is an old saying, "A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword"; and many men are as much galled with a calumny, a scurrile and bitter jest, a libel, a pasquil, satire, apologue, epigram, stage-plays, or the like, as with any misfortune whatsoever.
Robert Burton
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