Intoxicology: Findings From The Drunken Science

"Rich inner substance": more Soviet anti(!?)-alcohol posters at the Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters.

Bronze is the mirror of the form; wine, of the heart.
- Aeschylus, Fragments

I drink to the trick of a mouth that betrayed me,
To the eyes and the look that lied.
I drink to the terrible world we inhabit
And to God, who never replied.
- Anna Akhmatova, "The Last Toast"

If all be true that I do think,
There are five reasons we should drink;
Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
Or lest we should be by and by,
Or any other reason why.
- Henry Aldritch

The first cup is for thirst, the second for mirth, the third for delight, the fourth for madness.
- Apuleius, Florida

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it - it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
- Charles Baudelaire, "Be Drunk"

In 27 years I've drunk fifty thousand beers & they just wash against me like the sea into a pier.
- David Berman, "Trains Across the Sea"

. . . glazed with mezcal, the tequila is more at ease, like a naked woman in a fur coat.
- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
— Charles Bukowski, Factotum

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.
— Charles Bukowski, London Magazine

Wine drinking is a transgression; if you wish to commit a transgression it should at least not be a flavourless one. If you drink wine, let it be the finest – so that even though you may be convicted of sin in the next world, you will at any rate not be branded a fool in this.
- Ibn Butlan, Qabus Namus

There's nought, no doubt, so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion.
- Lord Byron, Don Juan

I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
- Miguel de Cervantes, The History of Don Quixote of la Mancha‎

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo and when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive drinking of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.
- Cliff Clavin, Cheers

I also recall during the Khomeini revolution substituting vodka for red wine in restaurants so that revolutionary guards looking in believed we were drinking water. A wealthy Azerbaijani friend in Shemiran hired a mechanical digger at that time to bury enough whisky and vodka in his garden to last for the rest of his life (I don't know whether he is still alive!).
- William Dunn

To hell with poverty — we’ll get drunk on cheap wine!
- Gang of Four, "To Hell with Poverty"

Nothing equals the joy of the drinker, except the joy of the wine in being drunk.
- French Proverb

Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
- Ernest Hemingway

God made Man
Frail as a bubble;
God made Love,
Love made trouble.
God made the Vine,
Was it a sin
That Man made Wine
To drown Trouble in?
- Oliver Herford, "A Plea"

They [Persians] are very fond of wine, and drink it in large quantities. It is also their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of weight when they are drunk; and then on the morrow, when they are sober, the decision to which they came the night before is put before them by the master of the house in which it was made; and if it is then approved of, they act on it; if not, they set it aside. Sometimes, however, they are sober at their first deliberation, but in this case they always reconsider the matter under the influence of wine.
- Herodotus, Histories

And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
- A.E. Housman, "A Shropshire Lad"

Another prince, when similarly reproached by a Sufi sheikh, replied that he would only abstain from wine-drinking when it became the greatest of his remaining sins.
- Robert Irwin, Wines in the Koran

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. . . . To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life.
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

For wine is a wet fire.
- Joseph Joubert, Notebooks

I often wonder what the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell.
- Omar Khayyam, The Rubáiyát

One can drink too much, but one never drinks enough.
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Wine is accredited only with the misdeeds it induces: what is forgotten is the hundreds of good deeds of which it is also the cause. Wine excites to action: to good action in the good, to bad in the bad.
- Georg Lichtenberg, Waste Books

Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard's life!
- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

We give you the fruit of the palm and the vine from which you derive intoxicants and wholesome food.
- Mohammad, The Koran

When I drink, I’m dozy but I fancy getting cosy.
- Aidan Moffett, "Meanwhile At The Bar A Drunkard Muses"

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
- Ogden Nash, "Reflections on Ice-Breaking"

I drink to make other people interesting.
- George Jean Nathan

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Alcoholism is a search for a common language, or at least, it is a compensation for a language that has been lost.
- Octavio Paz, "The Symposium and the Hermit"

Not drunk is he who from the floor
Can rise alone, and still drink more;
But drunk is he who prostrate lies,
Without the power to drink or rise.
- T.L. Peacock, "Misfortunes of Elphin"

Vodka is our enemy, so let’s finish it off.
- Russian Proverb

Come, thou monarch of the vine,
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!
In thy fats our cares be drown'd,
With thy grapes our hairs be crown'd:
Cup us, till the world goes round!
- Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies - and as mysterious.
- James Thurber, Collecting Himself

I had no plans to join Black Sabbath. I went out with Geezer and Tony and we got drunk, and I found out the next day that I agreed to join the band.
- Bill Ward

You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.
- Oscar Wilde

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.
- Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Gin for executions, beer for birthdays, wine for weddings.
- P. J. Wolfson