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Quotes

No lyric poems live long or please many people which are written by drinkers of water.

—Horace, 20 BC

For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.

—Herman Melville, 1851

To safeguard one’s health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome illness indeed.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1678

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

—Virginia Woolf, 1929

Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches?

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1862

Thought depends absolutely on the stomach, but in spite of that, those who have the best stomachs are not the best thinkers.

—Voltaire, 1770

The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest.

—Adam Smith, 1776

A great step toward independence is a good-humored stomach, one that is willing to endure rough treatment.

—Seneca the Younger, c. 60

He makes his cook his merit, and the world visits his dinners and not him.

—Molière, 1666

When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.

—St. Jerome, 395

At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.

—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896

I cannot but bless the memory of Julius Caesar, for the great esteem he expressed for fat men and his aversion to lean ones.

—David Hume, 1751