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

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615

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

—St. Jerome, 395

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

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

—Horace, 20 BC

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

—William Shakespeare, c. 1595

Most vegetarians I ever saw looked enough like their food to be classed as cannibals.

—Finley Peter Dunne, 1900

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

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886

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

—Seneca the Younger, c. 60

Cooking is the most massive rush. It’s like having the most amazing hard-on, with Viagra sprinkled on top of it, and it’s still there twelve hours later.

—Gordon Ramsey, 2003

What is food to one is to others bitter poison.

—Lucretius, 50 BC

One of the important requirements for learning how to cook is that you also learn how to eat.

—Julia Child, 2001

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

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.

—Sydney Smith, 1855

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts. 

—Aldous Huxley, 1929

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

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

—Socrates, c. 430 BC

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

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

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

—Luis Buñuel, 1983

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

—La Rochefoucauld, 1678

Is it only the mouth and belly which are injured by hunger and thirst? Men’s minds are also injured by them.

—Mencius, 300 BC

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

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

—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896

A woman should never be seen eating or drinking unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands.

—Lord Byron, 1812

Whatsoever was the father of a disease, an ill diet was the mother.

—George Herbert, 1651

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

—Voltaire, 1770

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

—Molière, 1666