Bartalk

A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.
--W.C. Fields

The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober.
-William Butler Yeats

Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk.
--Tom Waits

The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given to imagination--imagination being little else than another name for illusion.
--Samuel Butler, English novelist (1835-1902)

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
--For Whom the Bell Tolls,
Ernest Hemingway

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
--Ernest Hemingway

Good men drink good beer.
--Hunter S. Thompson

Gin and orange juice are the best cure for alcoholism, the real cause of which is ugliness and the complete baffling sterility of existence as sold to you.
--Malcolm Lowry, English writer (1909-1957)

Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony.
--Robert Benchley

One more drink and I’d have been under the host.
--Dorothy Parker

Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
--A. E. Houseman

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
--Herman Melville

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
--Oscar Wilde

The secret of drunkenness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.
--Omar Khayyam

Alcohol is a very necessary article . . . It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.
--George Bernard Shaw

The gods who are most interested in the human race preside over the tavern. The tavern will compare favorably with the church. The church is the place where prayers and sermons are delivered, but the tavern is where they are to take effect, and if the former are good, the latter cannot be bad . . .
--Henry David Thoreau



Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
--Ambrose Bierce

An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.
--Dylan Thomas

I have written much less than people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.
--Guy Debord, French social revolutionary (1931-1994)

The heart which grief hath cankered
Hath one unfailing remedy--the Tankard.
--C. S. Calverley, English Poet (1831-1884)

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Think of the wonders uncorked by wine! It opens secrets, gives heart to our hopes, pushes the cowardly into battle, lifts the load from anxious minds, and evokes talents. Thanks to the bottle’s prompting no one is lost for words, no one who’s cramped by poverty fails to find release.
--Horace

Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.
--Charles Bukowski

What’s drinking? A mere pause from thinking!
--Lord Byron

From wine what sudden friendship springs!
--John Gay, English poet and playwright (1685-1732)

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane . . . There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
--Charles Baudelaire

A glass of good wine is a gracious creature,
And reconciles poor mortality to itself,
And that is what few things can do.
--Sir Walter Scott

The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.
--Charles Lamb

In a world where there is a law against people ever showing their emotions, or ever releasing themselves from the greyness of their days, a drink is not a social tool. It is a thing you need in order to live.
--Jimmy Breslin

Drink heightens feeling. When I drink, it heightens my emotions and I put it in a story.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was very proud, and John Barleycorn was very proud with me. I could carry my drink. I was a man. I had drunk two men, drink for drink, into unconsciousness.
--Jack London

How solemn and beautiful is the thought that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary--but always whiskey.
--Mark Twain

If, as some say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down,
And spare Hotaling’s whisky?
--Doggerel written following the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake

Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern.
--John Keats

And fill them high with generous juice,
As generous as your mind,
And pledge me in the Generous toast
The whole of human kind!
--Robert Burns

And last but definitely not least. . .

You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
--Dean Martin

I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.
--Frank Sinatra



Copyright © 2003 Vesuvio Café