I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren’t people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.
—Jack Kerouac, 1957Quotes
It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well, and justly, and impossible to live wisely, well, and justly without living pleasurably.
—Epicurus, c. 300 BCSome writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal, 1981Abstainer, n. A weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Modern life is often a mechanical oppression, and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
—Ernest Hemingway, 1935Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations—wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
—Edmund Burke, 1795I am sure of this: that if everybody was to drink their bottle a day, there would not be half the disorders in the world there are now.
—Jane Austen, c. 1798Drinking with women is as unnatural as scolding with ’em.
—William Wycherley, 1675A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
—Will Self, 1994Whoever gulps down wine as a horse gulps down water is called a Scythian.
—Athenaeus, c. 230The drunken man is a living corpse.
—St. John Chrysostom, c. 390