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.

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.

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.

I 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.

The drunken man is a living corpse.

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.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.

A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.

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

Alcohol is the monarch of liquids.

People who’ve drunk neat wine don’t care a damn.