Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.

Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.

An old man is twice a child, and so is a drunken man.

Moderation in all things.

Drinking with women is as unnatural as scolding with ’em.

Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well, and justly, and impossible to live wisely, well, and justly without living pleasurably.

Drink does not drown care but waters it, and makes it grow faster.

I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.

Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.