Food

A full belly, a heavy purse, and a light heart.

 

According to the Spanish proverb, four persons are wanted to make a good salad; a spendthrift for oil, a miser for vinegar, a counsellor for salt, and a madman to stir all up.
-Abraham Hayward, The Art of Dining

 

All human history attests
That happiness to man-the hungry sinner-
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner!
-Lord Byron

 

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a fatted ox and hatred.
-Ancient proverb

 

Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you diet.

 

Eat well's drink well's brother.
-Old Scottish proverb

 

Good pies and strong beer.
-Poor Robin's Almanack, 1695

 

Health to our bodies, peace to our minds, and plenty to our boards.
-Eighteenth-century toast before dinner

 

I'd rather have a dinner while I'm living than a monument when I'm dead, for the dinner will be on my friends, while the monument would be on me.

 

"I was always religiously inclined,"
Said the oyster as he slid down
The minister's throat, "but ne'er
Did I dream I'd enter the clergy."

 

Let the dogs wait a long time.
-Irish wish for a lengthy and ample dinner

 

May they have sugar to their strawberries!
-Leigh Hunt, translated from an unidentified Italian poet, 1840

 

May you always have red-eye gravy with your ham, hush puppies with your catfish, and the good sense not to argue with your wife.
-Toast From Tennessee, quoted by Timothy Noah in the New Republic

 

O hour of all hours, the most blessed upon earth, the blessed hour of our dinners!
Edward George Lytton

 

On the table spread the cloth,
Let the knives be sharp and clean;
Pickles get and salad both,
Let them each be fresh and green.

 

Only the truly mad eat alone, like Howard Hughes and Stalin.
-Guy Davenport

 

With small beer, good ale and wine,
O ye gods! how I shall dine!

 

Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.

 

To eat, to drink, and to be merry.
-Ecclesiastes 8:15

 

To Gasteria, the tenth Muse, who presides over the enjoyments of Taste.
-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

 

To Mom's cooking:
May my wife never find out how bad it really was.

 

To soup: May it be seen and not heard.

 

Unquiet meals make ill digestions.
-Shakespeare,
The Comedy of Errors, Act V

 

We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
We may live without books-what is knowledge but grieving?
We may live without hope-what is hope but deceiving?
We may live without love-what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?
-Owen Meredith in "Lucile"

 

Who can believe with common sense,
A bacon slice gives God offence?
Or how a herring hath a charm
Almighty vengeance to disarm?
Wrapt up in majesty divine,
Does he regard on what we dine?
-Jonathan Swift