The drunken man is a living corpse.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.

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.

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation.

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.

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

Whoever gulps down wine as a horse gulps down water is called a Scythian.

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.

Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.

I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren’t people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.

Under 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.

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

Modern life is often a mechanical oppression, and liquor is the only mechanical relief.