Love Quote by Robert Burton

Trying to explain love, Burton suggests, is an act of comic futility: you bring out a tiny, earnest candle and hold it up to the sun as if the sun needs help being bright. The line is a compact piece of Renaissance skepticism dressed as modesty. It flatters love by treating it as self-evident and overpowering, while also poking at the human itch to systematize what can only be lived.

Burton wrote in an age that adored grand taxonomies. The Anatomy of Melancholy is basically a baroque filing cabinet of quotations, medical theories, theology, classical lore, and personal observation. That’s what makes this sentence sting: it comes from a man who spends hundreds of pages trying to map inner life, then admits there are experiences that burn through the map. The subtext isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-pretension. Love’s "power and effect" have already done their work on you; any extra rhetoric risks looking like vanity, not insight.

The image also carries a quiet warning about proportion. A candle is useful in darkness; it’s ridiculous at noon. Burton implies that discourse about love often serves the speaker more than the subject: proof of cleverness, moral instruction, control. By invoking the sun, he reframes love as a force that dwarfs our explanatory tools, exposing the limits of language at the exact moment we most want language to perform.