Intemperance is a dangerous companion. It throws many people off their guard, betrays them to a great many indecencies, to ruinous passions, to disadvantages in fortune; makes them discover secrets, drive foolish bargains, engage in play, and often to stagger from the tavern to the stews.

There is more of turn than of truth in a saying of Seneca, “That drunkenness does not produce but discover faults.” Common experience teaches the contrary. Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses dualities into the mind which she is a stranger to in her sober moments.

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to severn strode, / The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

Most men call fretting a minor fault, a foible, and not a vice. There is no vice except drunkenness which can so utterly destroy the peace, the happiness of a hoe.

A day of minor profit or prophet led to a night of drunkenness.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn’t. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

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.

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars.

All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a man: because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast.

Now don’t say you can’t swear off drinking; it’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.

A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.

Drunkenness is simply voluntary insanity.

Now I am sober and there’s only the hangover and the memory of love.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

Some people are commended for a giddy kind of good-humor, which is as much a virtue as drunkenness.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.

According to Kim Jong-Il’s biography, they say he has been constantly accused of dishonesty, drunkenness and sexual excess. So if he lived here, he could be in Congress.

I fought against the bottle, but I had to do it drunk. Took my diamond to the pawn shop, but that don’t make it junk.

Please don’t drive drunk, okay? Seriously… But by all means, walk drunk. That looks hilarious. Everyone loves to watch someone act like they are trying to make it to safety during a hurricane.

The longer it possesseth a man the more he will delight in it, and the older he groweth the more he shall be subject to it; for it dulleth the spirits, and destroyeth the body as ivy doth the old tree, or as the worm that engendereth in the kernal of the nut.

I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

I drink too much. The last time I gave a urine sample it had an olive in it.

Drunkenness is nothing else but a voluntary madness.

Prohibition may be a disputed theory, but none can say that it doesn’t hold water.

I thought for a change I would give up drinking, and it was a great mistake, and, although I reduced the size of my nose and improved my beauty, my stomach suffered.

People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.

. . . as far as the regime is concerned, well, the play is sheer terror for them. Because they feel, How dare – how dare anybody lift his or her voice in criticism against us? We have the guns. Their level of paranoia and power-drunkenness is unbelievable.

Who after wine, talks of wars hardships or of poverty.

Had we been as free from all sins as we were from gluttony and drunkenness we might have been canonized for saints.

If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

Sleep! The most beautiful experience in life. Except drink.

How little our libraries cost us as compared with our liquor cellars.

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.

Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.

I feel sorry for people who do not have a Bible to lean on.

Drunkeness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

Pride may be allowed to this or that degree, else a man cannot keep up dignity. In gluttony there must be eating, in drunkenness there must be drinking; ‘tis not the eating, and ’tis not the drinking that must be blamed, but the excess. So in pride.

If a man’s innate self-respect will not save him from habitual, disgusting intoxication, all the female influences in the universe would not avail. Man’s will, like woman‘s, is stronger than the affection, and, once subjugated by vice, all eternal influences will be futile.

It’s hogwash to say drunkenness is no excuse for crime… Wherever mind altering drugs are on sale to the public, we should expect mind altered behaviour from the public.

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

Remember, that when I speak of pleasures I always mean the elegant pleasures of a rational being, and not the brutal ones of a swine. I mean la bonne chГЁre, short of gluttony; wine, infinitely short of drunkenness; play, without the least gaming; and gallantry, without debauchery.

Of course one should not drink much, but often.

The man had arrived at that stage of drunkenness where affection is felt for the universe.

The only proper intoxication is conversation.

Drunkenness is never anything but a substitute for happiness.

They who drink beer will think beer.

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.

Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution or of a bad memory of a constitution so treacherously good that it never bends till it breaks; or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting intoxicated, but forgets the pains of getting sober.

The vice and drunkenness among the lowering laboring classes is growing to frightful excess, and the multitudes of low Irish Catholics … restricted by poverty in their own country run riot in this … as long as we are overwhelmed with Irish immigrants, so long will the evil abound.

The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety. …People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare… On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice.

Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

They never taste who always drink.

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won‘t intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.

It were better for a man to be subject to any vice than to drunkenness; for all other vanities and sins are recovered, but a drunkard will never shake off the delight of beastliness.

And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness. But regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement. They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer.

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!” – Cassio (Act II, Scene iii)

The doctors of antiquity have affirmed that love is a passion that resembles a melancholy disease. The physician Rasis prescribed, therefore, in order to recover, coitus, fasting, drunkenness, and walking.

All the crimes on earth do not destroy so many of the human race nor alienate so much property as drunkenness.

Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.

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

Drink moderately, for drunkeness neither keeps a secret, nor observes a promise.

Food-addiction, or food-drunkenness, is an old story in Hygienic literature. This is the first mention I have seen of it in “regular” medical literature. I fear to hope that its recognition spells progress.

The Bible, in which these things are taught, favors drunkenness, murder, slavery, lying, stealing and lechery.

For although Claudius had been accused of gambling and drunkenness, not only were no worse sins laid to his charge, but he had successfully established some claim to being considered a learned man.

Your friends avoid you, brutishly transform‘d
They hardly know you, or if one remains
To wish you well, he wishes you in heaven.

Feast, n. A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness.

Who could have foretold, from the structure of the brain, that wine could derange its functions?

Now is the time for drinking; now the time to beat the earth with unfettered foot.

Good days are to be gathered like grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside the fire. If the traveler has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will.

If any young man wants to be a true temperance man let him go and get the delirium tremens, that’ll settle it.

Drunkenness is the very sepulcher
Of man’s wit and his discretion.

Drunkenness doesn’t create vices, but it brings them to the fore.

There is a drunkenness to grief, which is good.

A drunkard is unprofitable for any kind of good service.

Drunkenness was in good repute in England till “Bloody Mary” frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.

Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer.

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year‘s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.

I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.

What does drunkenness accomplish? It discloses secrets, it ratifies hopes, and urges even the unarmed to battle.

Drunkenness is deplorably destructive, but her demurer sister Gluttony destroys a hundred to her one.

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

While I was an addict, I didn’t write anything. I didn’t have the attention span or the will.

The best audience is one that is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.

You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.

Some men find happiness in gluttony and in drunkenness, but no delicate viands can touch their taste with the thrill of pleasure, and what generosity there is in wine steadily refuses to impart its glow to their shriveled hearts.

Intemperance is the plaque of sensuality, and temperance is not its bane but its seasoning.

Being a functioning alcoholic is kind of like being a paraplegic lap dancer: You can do it, just not as well as the others, really.

If the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.

I know people who do a lot of drugs, and they keep thinking about things from the past and things ahead. But they’re not living right here and now.

To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice.

Drinking is an art, not a sport. You make it a sport, you’re dead in the water, you lose everything. It’ll kill you, I tell you.

If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.

What Anacharsis said of the vine may aptly enough be said of prosperity. She bears the three grapes of drunkenness, pleasure, and sorrow; and happy is it if the last can cure the mischief which the former work. When afflictions fail to have their due effect, the case is desperate.

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

Let’s go and get drunk on light again – it has the power to console.

I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness.

Drunkenness is an immoderate affection and use of drink. That I call immoderation that is besides or beyond that order of good things for which God hath given us the use of drink.

What is a gathering without unseemly drunkenness?

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can’t spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a ‘k’ to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.

What does drunkenness not accomplish? It unlocks secrets, confirms our hopes, urges the indolent into battle, lifts the burden from anxious minds, teaches new arts.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

All excess is ill; but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous, and mad.

Beer, it’s the best damn drink in the world.

Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used.

[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.

Passion is the drunkenness of the mind.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.

The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline-enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery and drunkenness.

Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore always carry a small snake.

Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.

And if I drink oblivion of a day, / So shorten I the stature of my soul.

Troops of furies march in the drunkard’s triumph.

I have to think hard to name an interesting man who does not drink.

Flowers should be viewed when half open, wine should be drunk only to subtle intoxication; there is great fun in this. If you view flowers in full bloom and drink to drunkenness, it becomes a bad experience. Those who are living to the full should think about this.

The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.

Variant: I was driven to drink by a woman. I am forever grateful, yet I never had the good manners to thank her.

The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.

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.

The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.

Excitement is the drunkenness of the spirits. Only calm waters reflect heaven in their bosom.

Those interested in celestial navigation are advised to first obtain a rudimentary knowledge of integral calculus, phlebotomy, astral physics and related subjects. The use of liquor is strictly forbidden on interplanetary flights.

A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.

I drink to make other people interesting.

Very early in my childhood I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jail with large families.

Drunkenness is nothing but a self-induced state of insanity.

It is necessary for a Christian to fast, in order to clear his mind, to rouse and develop his feelings, and to stimulate his will to useful activity. These three human capabilities we darken and stifle above all by ‘surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life‘ (Lk. 21:34).

Booze is flowing all unknowing; grandma downs a few, smiles and giggles happily enjoying her new brew.

We can see in retrospect that criminalizing the consumption of alcohol proves not to be the solution to the very real problem of drunkenness. So to what I want to say is the very real problem of the human susceptibility to addiction isn’t best dealt with by building prisons and throwing people into jails.

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 hate ingratitude more in a man than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, or any taint of vice whose strong corruption inhabits our frail blood”.

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.

That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold; What hath quenched them hath given me fire.

Quart of whiskey a day for months working hard on a long poem. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Murderous and suicidal. Many hospitalizations, many alibis.

Herb is the healing of a nation, alcohol is the destruction.

Some of the domestic evils of drunkenness are houses without windows, gardens without fences, fields without tillage, barns without roofs, children without clothing, principles, morals or manners.

Football is not, in my view, a sport: it is somewhere between a business racket and a mental illness. I associate it with all the worst aspects of our society – violence, drunkenness, drugs, racism, exploitation, greed and stupidity; and that’s just for starters.

In my head I am in one of those Buddhist caves where you see a thousand Buddha faces on the wall. In my head I am on my seventeen-year-old acid trip, when I saw my personas fall one minute after another, as if I was dying every moment.

To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.

Habitual intoxication is the epitome of every crime.

Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?