The Quotable Drunkard

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

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, Latin epigram of the 16th century

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

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

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

I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
- Miguel de Cervantes

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
- Winston Churchill

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

I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs . . .
- Ernest Gellner

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

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 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, on Persians

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, reviewing 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.
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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.
- Kaikakavus, Persian prince

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

We give you the fruit of the palm and the vine from which you derive intoxicants and wholesome food.
- The Koran, Sura 16:69

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

When I drink, I’m dozy but I fancy getting cosy.
- Aidan Moffett

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

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

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

In vino veritas. (In wine there is truth.)
- Pliny, Historia naturalis

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, II, 7

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

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