Wit & Attitude Quote by Robert Burton

Burton delivers this like a physician of the soul who’s seen too many patients and stopped believing in miracle cures. The line is built on a cruel symmetry: hell on one side, plague on the other. Not “sadness” and “stress,” but the era’s two most loaded words for punishment and contagion. In one move he frames marriage and bachelorhood as rival afflictions, each with its own symptoms, each capable of consuming a life. The joke lands because it refuses the culture’s usual moral sorting, where marriage is virtue and singleness is failure. Burton flattens that hierarchy and replaces it with a deadpan diagnosis: either way, you’re vulnerable.

The specific intent is corrective, almost anti-romance. Writing in a world where the Church, law, and custom treated marriage as the proper destination for adulthood, Burton punctures the fantasy that a ring resolves desire, loneliness, or status anxiety. The unmarried man’s “hell” suggests longing, social suspicion, and the gnawing sense of being left outside the sanctioned story. The married man’s “plague” points to entanglement: obligations, mismatched temperaments, domestic conflict, financial strain, children, in-laws - a household as a petri dish for resentments.

Context matters: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is a catalog of human self-torments, and this epigram is classic Burtonian cynicism disguised as wisdom. The subtext is that people don’t actually want solutions; they want different problems. Marriage and singleness become interchangeable stage props for the same old melancholy, because the mind is the real disease vector.