The Anatomy of Melancholy

Adapt yourself, then, to your present circumstances, and cut your coat according to your cloth: “As we can, as they say, when we cannot do as we wish.” Be content with your loss, whatever your condition and calling may be, and rest satisfied with your present lot in life.

Be what you are; let everyone else be what they are. Do not wish to be what you are not; wish to be what you can.

Be as you are, and let others Remain as they are; desire what is and what may be.

As someone invited to a feast eats what is set before him and looks for nothing else, enjoy what you have and ask no more of God than he thinks fit to give you. “Not everyone gets to go to Corinth.” We cannot all be gentlemen, all Catos or Laeliuses, as Cicero tells us; all honourable, illustrious and serene; all rich. Mortal people need many things. Therefore, says Theodoret, God has distributed his gifts differently: wealth to one, skill to another, so that the rich might encourage and employ the poor, and the poor might learn different trades for the common good.

As a tapestry is made of different parts, some worked in silk, some in gold or silver, some in worsted yarn of different colours, all contributing to the beauty of the whole; as music is made of different discords and keys, and a total of many small numbers: so a commonwealth is made of different, unequal trades and callings.

If everyone were a Croesus or a Darius, all idle and equally wealthy, who would till the land? Menenius Agrippa answered Rome’s unruly crowd well with his elegant fable of the belly and the other parts of the body. Who would build houses or make the different fabrics for our clothes? We should all starve together, as Poverty explains at length in Aristophanes’ Wealth, and end by begging to return to our former condition.

God has therefore appointed this inequality of stations, orders and ranks, a hierarchy like that in everything else. The earth nourishes plants; creatures with senses feed on plants; both serve rational souls. People are subject to one another, and all to higher powers: so God would have it.

When everything is rightly examined and duly considered, then, there is no such cause for widespread discontent. It lies not in the thing itself but in our minds, in how we govern our passions and judge things. “Nothing else is needed to make you miserable,” says Cardano, “but that you believe yourself miserable.” Whatever your fortune may be, your mind alone makes you poor or rich, miserable or happy.

“I have seen,” says the divine Seneca, “sad people in a cheerful and pleasant villa, and busy people in the midst of solitude. It is the mind, not the place, that makes for tranquillity.” I have seen people miserably cast down in a pleasant village, and others well occupied and at ease in a lonely wilderness. It is the mind, not the place, that brings tranquillity and true contentment.