100 Thought-Provoking Alcohol Quotes

In the rich tapestry of human culture, alcohol has been a muse, a companion, and sometimes a scorned adversary. Throughout history, it has inspired wisdom, humor, reflection, and wit in equal measure. From the festive to the contemplative, alcohol-related quotes provide a window into our shared experiences, revealing truths about companionship, struggle, joy, and sorrow. In this blog post, we delve into a carefully curated collection of the top 100 thought-provoking quotes that capture the essence of alcohol's complex role in human life. Whether you are raising a glass in celebration or pondering life over a quiet drink, these quotes offer perspectives that speak to the heart of what it means to be human.

1. “Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat.” - Alex Levine

2. “it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance” - William Shakespeare

3. “Drinking is fun! It makes me feel horrible and sexy!” - Warren Ellis

4. “Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.” - David Sedaris

5. “Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.” - Frank Sinatra

6. “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

7. “That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” - Charles Bukowski

8. “There are two kinds of people I don't trust: people who don't drink and people who collect stickers.” - Chelsea Handler

9. “We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.” - David Sedaris

10. “I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight...I agree.” - Koren Zailckas

11. “I'm not drunk, just a little stoned.” - Gerard Way

12. “I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.” - Tom Waits

13. “Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.” - Louis Pasteur

14. “Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, may produce all the effects of drunkenness.” - Oscar Wilde

15. “It was like a Russian party, Arkady thought. People got drunk, recklessly confessed their love, spilled their festering dislike, had hysterics, marched out, were dragged back in and revived with brandy. It wasn't a French salon.” - Martin Cruz Smith

16. “Think champagne, drink champagne!” - Ellen Dean

17. “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.” - George Best

18. “There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.” - Graham Greene

19. “It began to falter not when the book publishers who loved books gave way to those who preferred profits to reading. It happened when publishers and editors cut back on their drinking. If there is one national flower in book publishing, it is the martini.” - Al Silverman

20. “If I have a near-beer, I’m near beer. And if I’m near beer, I’m close to tequila. And if I’m close to tequila, I’m adjacent to cocaine.” - Craig Ferguson

21. “They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table.” - Anthony Bourdain

22. “Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.” - Robert A. Heinlein

23. “The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: "booze affects material as it does people.” - Alice Sebold

24. “I think the warning labels on alcoholic beverages are too bland. They should be more vivid. Here is one I would suggest: "Alcohol will turn you into the same asshole your father was.” - George Carlin

25. “To alcohol! The cause of... and solution to... all of life's problems” - Matt Groening

26. “For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it to the bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.” - David Sedaris

27. “Alcohol, I had learned, was an eloquent if somewhat inaccurate interpreter. I had placed my trust that December night in glass after glass of it, eager not for drink but for a bit of talk. ” - Monique Truong

28. “It seemed that I performed better sober than drunk. Who knew?” - Craig Ferguson

29. “I took a breath. Pictured the bed waiting for me upstairs. Then retreated to the lobbybar alone and ordered an ice-cold gin martini, a small signal to myself that my work was done. I held the glass, its inverted construction an insult to gravity and the order of things. Just like our Movement, from the outside the balance of power seems all wrong. But hold a martini glass in your hand and you know instinctively that it is just right.” - Stuart Connelly

30. “I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.” - Sylvia Plath

31. “Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.” - Terry Pratchett

32. “Fill with mingled cream and amber, I will drain that glass again.Such hilarious visions clamber Through the chamber of my brain —Quaintest thoughts — queerest fancies Come to life and fade away;What care I how time advances? I am drinking ale today.” - Edgar Allan Poe

33. “Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.” - Christopher Hitchens

34. “I am not your victim because you are not a predator any more than a bottle of scotch stalks an alcoholic.” - Sue William Silverman

35. “You're walking down Fool's Street, Laura used to say when he was drinking, and she had been right. He had known even then that she was right, but knowing had made no difference; he had simply laughed at her fears and gone on walking down it, till finally he had stumbled and fell. Then, for a long time, he stayed away, and if he had stayed away long enough he would have been all right; but one night he began walking down it again - and met the girl. It was inevitable that on Fool's Street there should be women as well as wine.He had walked down it many times in many different towns, and now he was walking down it once again in yet another town. Fool's Street never changed, no matter where you went, and this one was no different from the others. The same skeletonic signs bled beer names in vacant windows; the same winos sat in doorways nursing muscatel; the same drunk tank awaited you when at last your reeling footsteps failed. And if the sky was darker than usual, it was only because of the rain which had begun falling early that morning and been falling steadily ever since.” - Robert F. Young

36. “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.” - William Shakespeare

37. “When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground.” - Denis Johnson

38. “I think that it is a great tragedy that a child can lose their mother, father, sister or brother, because you and I made a decision that getting loaded was more important than they are.” - Pamela Barrett

39. “The devil lives in a double-shot", Roman explains himself obscurely. "I got a great worm inside. Gnaws and gnaws. Every day I drown him and every day he gnaws. Help me drown the worm, fellas.” - Nelson Algren

40. “Curse you, cheap beer. Must find miso in tiny packet.” - MCM

41. “My first incident drinking alcohol occurred after a 2-month period in which I stole wine coolers and beers from my parents and hid them in different places around my room. I was 14 years old, in eighth grade. I invited a friend over one night after I had stolen enough. After 2 wine coolers the friend interrupted me, saying, "Hold on," and vomited into a trash can. I vomited a lot into the toilet. The next day, like a dumbass, I put the empty wine cooler and beer bottles in our outside garbage bin without trying to cover them. My dad caught me as a result, but hid it from my mom for unknown reasons.” - Brandon Scott Gorrell

42. “Shan stared at his glass, then lifted it under his nose. It was the closest he would knowingly get to tasting the hard liquor. It was not because it would violate the vows of the monks, which he had not taken, but because somehow it felt as though it would violate his teachers who still sat behind prison wire in Lhadrung.” - Eliot Pattison

43. “She had not character enough to take to drinking, and moaned about, slip-shod and in curl-papers, all day.” - William Makepeace Thackeray

44. “I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.” - Douglas Coupland

45. “That's what was wrong with drinking too much. You became immune to drunken delights. There was no solace in liquor. Before you got happy, you collapsed.” - Richard Matheson

46. “[She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women were also wandering in their gait. . . . Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.” - Thomas Hardy

47. “Jon:'What are you doing up there? Why aren't you at the feast?'Tyrion: 'Too hot, too noisy, and I'd drunk too much wine', the dwarf told him. 'I learned long ago that it is considered rude to vomit on your brother.” - George R.R. Martin

48. “I mulled over what he had told me as I savored the Scotch. Not bad, really — like a beer that’s been in a brawl.” - David Justice

49. “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!" - Cassio (Act II, Scene iii)” - William Shakespeare

50. “So what are you planning to do with the rest of your life?Develop a drinking problem. More Scotch, please.” - Daniel Silva

51. “This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone.” - Sam Shepard

52. “To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.” - Caroline Knapp

53. “It's 4:58 on Friday afternoon. Do you know where your margarita is?” - Amy Neftzger

54. “A substantial daily intake of alcohol was the perfect way to stay in shape.” - Simon Napier-Bell

55. “Ive created a new drink! I'm calling it the Piñata Colada! Its sweet and tasty, but when you wake up the next morning your head feels like its been hitten with a stick.” - José N. Harris

56. “Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn't work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn't that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. ("Novelty")” - John Crowley

57. “Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” - Charles Bukowski

58. “Lucy preferred gin and tonics during the summer and switched over to whiskey sours in the winter. At dinner, a sit-down affair with the family, Lucy drank whatever the Temerlins drank, including expensive French wines. "She never gets obnoxious, even when smashed to the brink of unconsciousness," wrote Maurice, revealing more about the chimp's alcoholism than perhaps he intended. At one point, he tried to wean Lucy off the good stuff and onto Boone's Farm apple wine. Assuming she would delight in the fruity swill, he purchased a case and filled her glass one night at dinner. Lucy took a sip of the apple wine, noticed her parents were drinking something else, and put her glass down. She then graabbed Maurice's glass of Chablis and polished it off. She finished Jane's next. Not another sip of Boone's farm ever touched her lips.” - Elizabeth Hess

59. “الرب أعطى النقود، والشيطان صنع ثقباً. وها هي نقود الرب تتسرب عبر ثقب الشيطان.” - Valentin Rasputin

60. “An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate.” - Criss Jami

61. “Tess realized one of the great modern dating sadnesses: everyone is so used to the comforting glow of the computer screen that no one can go so far as to say "good morning" in public without being liquored up.” - Amelia Gray

62. “They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.” - Ellis Peters

63. “Sam took another sip of the pruno. It went down smoother this time, possibly because he no longer had feeling in his extremities.” - Tod Goldberg

64. “The others would then fall silent and she would continue about doped gallium arsenide detectors, or the ethanol content of the galactic cloud W-3. The quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than enough to maintain the present population of the Earth, if every adult were a dedicated alcoholic, for the age of the solar system. The tamada had appreciated the remark.” - Carl Sagan

65. “I like to see the glass as half full, hopefully of jack daniels.” - Darynda Jones

66. “He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.“‘How about my present?’ she demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.“Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer. Ah!“No. No use. Impossible. The will but not the way. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Try again. No. The booze, it must be. See Macbeth. One last try. No, no use. Not this evening, I’m afraid.“All right, Dora, don’t you worry. You’ll get your two quid all right. We aren’t paying by results.“He made a clumsy gesture. ‘Here, give us that bottle. That bottle off the dressing-table.’“Dora brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail.” - George Orwell

67. “I feel like today should be a perfect Meatball day... Let's just get wastey-pants!” - Snooki

68. “I think I need a drink.''Almost everybody does only they don't know it.” - Charles Bukowski

69. “If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.” - Tahir Shah

70. “The most dangerous drink is gin. You have to be really, really careful with that. And you also have to be 45, female and sitting on the stairs. Because gin isn't really a drink, it's more a mascara thinner. "Nobody likes my shoes!" "I made... I made fifty... fucking vol-au-vents, and not one of you... not one of you... said 'Thank you.'" And my favourite: "Everybody, shut up. Shut up! This song is all about me.” - Dylan Moran

71. “Civilization begins with distillation” - William Faulkner

72. “A drink centers me but I usually make myself wait until at least 9:00 PM for that. Or 8:00 PM. Whichever comes first.” - Bill Callahan

73. “If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.” - Bill Hicks

74. “Beer dulls a memory, brand sets it burning, but wine is the best for a sore heart's yearning.” - Patrick Rothfuss

75. “Is that vodka?" Margarita asked weakly.The cat jumped up in his seat with indignation."I beg pardon, my queen," he rasped, "Would I ever allow myself to offer vodka to a lady? This is pure alcohol!” - Mikhail Bulgakov

76. “Everyone is drinking. She can feel them out there drinking, turning into beasts.” - Anna Keesey

77. “What is this thing you call substance abuse? All I wanna do is forget and get loose.Drinking and smoking over and overWhat's so great about a life that's sober?There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.I'm tired of searching for words in the sky.All I wanna do is drink and die. Nothing is real. It's all a big lie. All I wanna do is drink and die. There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.” - Benjamin Alire Saenz

78. “Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse,And malt does more than Milton can To justify God’s ways to man.” - A.E. Housman

79. “Nagbibigay na, sinasakal pa. Iyan ang Ginebra.” - Norman Wilwayco

80. “My point about alcohol is that if you abuse something, it abuses you back.” - Michka Assayas

81. “There is more food in a pennyworth of bread than in a gallon of ale.” - Joseph Livesey

82. “Alcoholism is a Curse” - honeya

83. “Dell had left the army and taken the discipline home with him. I’d left the theatre world and taken the whisky sodas home with me.” - Mark Capell

84. “Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones that ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge.” - Liz Jensen

85. “Wine gives one 'ideas,' whereas champagne gives one 'strategies.” - Roman Payne

86. “„Tik išgėręs žmogus su malonumu gali prisiminti ką nors nemalonaus iš savo gyvenimo.” - Sigitas Parulskis

87. “The way a man drinks in company tells you nothing about him, but the way he drinks when alone reveals, without his realizing it, the very depths of his soul.” - Irene Nemirovsky

88. “Trillian did a little research in the ship's copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness. "Go to it," it said, "and good luck.” - Douglas Adams

89. “Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves.” - MacDonald Harris

90. “She thought the jimster (Jack Daniels) would cure whatever was wrong with her- whatever made her feel like she was in a hall of mirrors, watching herself go through the motions of having a riotous good time” - Lucinda Rosenfeld

91. “If you abandon your two glasses of wine, it is to show your children, your friends, and your society that your life is not only for yourself. Your life is for your ancestors, future generations, and also your society. To stop drinking two glasses of wine every week is a very deep practice, even if it has not brought you any harm. That is the insight of a bodhisattva who knows that everything she does is done for all her ancestors and future generations... In modern life, people think that their body belongs to them and they can do anything they want to it... This is one of the manifestations of individualism. But, according to the teaching of emptiness, your body is not yours. Your body belongs to your ancestors, your parents, and future generations. It also belongs to society and to all other living beings. All of them have come together to bring about the presence of this body--the trees, clouds, everything. Keeping your body healthy is to express gratitude to the whole cosmos, to all ancestors, and also not to betray the future generations," (64-65).” - Thich Nhat Hanh

92. “It's six o'clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark - three-quarters down not three-quarters up - and the night begins.("New York Blues")” - Cornell Woolrich

93. “I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.” - Augusten Burroughs

94. “I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.” - Carrie Fisher

95. “For more than a century-and-a-half, Europeans had been killing North American Indians with firewater… Now, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Canada’s pioneer settlers were killing themselves with their own medicine. About Canada. Toronto: Civil Sector Press, November, 2012. Alcohol, North American Indians, Settlers, Canada” - Earle Gray

96. “The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.” - Helen Bevington

97. “It was baking hot in the square when we came out after lunch with our bags and the rod-case to go to Burguete. People were on top of the bus, and others were climbing up a ladder. Bill went up and Robert sat beside Bill to save a place for me, and I went back in the hotel to get a couple of bottles of wine to take with us. When I came out the bus was crowded. Men and women were sitting on all the baggage and boxes on top, and the women all had their fans going in the sun. It certainly was hot. Robert climbed down and fitted into the place he had saved on the one wooden seat that ran across the top. Robert Cohn stood in the shade of the arcade waiting for us to start. A Basque with a big leather wine-bag in his lap lay across the top of the bus in front of our seat, leaning back against our legs. He offered the wine-skin to Bill and to me, and when I tipped it up to drink he imitated the sound of a klaxon motor-horn so well and so suddenly that spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed. He apologized and made me take another drink. He made the klaxon again a little later, and it fooled me the second time. He was very good at it. The Basques liked it. The man next to Bill was talking to him in Spanish and Bill was not getting it, so he offered the man one of the bottles of wine. The man waved it away. He said it was too hot and he had drunk too much at lunch. When Bill offered the bottle the second time he took a long drink, and then the bottle went all over that part of the bus. Every one took a drink very politely, and then they made us cork it up and put it away. They all wanted us to drink from their leather wine-bottles. They were peasants going up into the hills.” - Ernest Hemingway

98. “A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking” - Anne Enright

99. “The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

100. “Texting and phone calls, fireworks, blends, café au lait, and music. Yesterday's television. Work and beer. The neighbor's dog, or those strange flowers, the way it smells at Maisen. Those ordinary things I talk about with you. With you... I want to talk about love with you.” - Tomoko Yamashita