Archive

Quotes

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

—La Rochefoucauld, 1678

We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink, for dining alone is leading the life of a lion or wolf. 

—Epicurus, c. 300 BC

‘Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

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

—Molière, 1666

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943

The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.

—Luis Buñuel, 1983

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

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

—Horace, 20 BC

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

—Seneca the Younger, c. 60

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

—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896

’Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1595

Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.

—Socrates, c. 430 BC

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

—Virginia Woolf, 1929