81 Inspiring Drinking Quotes

Are you in search of the perfect words to accompany your drink or toast? Whether you're celebrating a milestone, reminiscing with friends, or simply enjoying a quiet evening, a well-chosen quote can perfectly capture the moment. We've curated a collection of the top 81 inspiring drinking quotes that span a range of emotions and occasions. Join us as we explore these timeless words of wisdom that celebrate the joy, complexity, and camaraderie that come with raising a glass. Pour yourself a drink, sit back, and let these quotes inspire your next toast. Cheers!

1. “Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” - Ernest Hemingway

2. “I like to have a martini,Two at the very most.After three I'm under the table,after four I'm under my host.” - Dorothy Parker

3. “I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.” - W.C. Fields

4. “I drink to make other people more interesting.” - Hemingway, Ernest

5. “War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.” - William Faulkner

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

7. “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

8. “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.” - G.K. Chesterton

9. “I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.” - Anne Lamott

10. “When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.” - Jimmy Breslin

11. “Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.” - Tom Hodgkinson

12. “Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so?There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.” - Drew Carey

13. “They say the only people who tell the truth are drunkards and children. Guess which one I am.” - Stephen Colbert

14. “A lady came up to me one day and said 'Sir! You are drunk', to which I replied 'I am drunk today madam, and tomorrow I shall be sober but you will still be ugly.” - Winston Churchill

15. “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” - James Crumley

16. “In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.” - Benjamin Franklin

17. “There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.” - Bette Davis

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

19. “There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.” - Cormac McCarthy

20. “One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time.” - Nancy Astor

21. “So much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have some bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.” - Alexandre Dumas

22. “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

23. “Are you there vodka? It's me, Chelsea. Please get me out of jail and I promise I will never drink again. Drink and drive. I will never drink and drive again. I may even start my own group fashioned after MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but I'll call it AWLTDASH, Alcoholics Who Like to Drink and Stay Home.” - Chelsea Handler

24. “A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.” - Raymond Chandler

25. “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

26. “Scotch whisky is made from barley and the morning dew on angel's nipples.” - Warren Ellis

27. “Janx Spirit : Janx Spirit is a rather potent alcoholic beverage, and is used heavily in drinking games that are played in the hyperspace ports that serve the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta. The game is not unlike the Earth game called Indian Wrestling, and is played like this: Two contestants sit at either side of a table, with a glass in front of each of them. Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit — as immortalized in that ancient Orion mining song :“Oh don’t give me no more of that Old Janx SpiritNo, don’t you give me no more of that Old Janx SpiritFor my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may dieWon’t you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit”Each of the two contestants would then concentrate their will on the bottle and attempt to tip it and pour spirit into the glass of his opponent – who would then have to drink it. The bottle would then be refilled. The game would be played again. And again. Once you started to lose you would probably keep losing, because one of the effects of Janx spirit is to depress telepsychic power. As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological.” - Douglas Adams

28. “You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her.” - Tom Waits

29. “I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.” - Charles Bukowski

30. “Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.” - Craig Ferguson

31. “Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.” - Jim Butcher

32. “Think of the power we could have if all the energy and effort in the world – or maybe even just your energy and effort? – that goes into drinking were put into resisting, building, creating. Try adding up all the money anarchists in your community have spent on corporate libations, and picture how much musical equipment or bail money or food it could have paid for – instead of funding their war against all of us.” - CrimethInc.

33. “The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. 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

34. “Now is the time to drink!” - Horace

35. “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

36. “I'm going out for a bottle of champagne. We're going to get bombed.” - Stephen King

37. “Rumor had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a garden-variety alcoholic.” - Michel Houellebecq

38. “Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.” - Douglas Coupland

39. “I think piracy is a bit like drinking. You want to stay out all night doing it, you pay the price the next day.” - Scott Lynch

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

41. “I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” - Dorothy Parker

42. “I'm a drinker with writing problems.” - Brendan Behan

43. “I've gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” - Winston S. Churchill

44. “In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment.” - Florence King

45. “In the fall he picked up his phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.'Jack,' my grandmother announced, 'I am thinking of coming to stay.' My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.'I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I've been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough.''Lynn, we're just beginning to start over again,' he stammered. Still, he couldn't depend on Nate's mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence. My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. 'I will contain my drinking until'- she thought hard here- 'after five o'clock, and,' she said,' what the hell, I'll stop altogether if you should find it necessary.''Do you know what you're saying?'My grandmother felt a clarity from her phone hand down to her pump-encased feet. 'Yes, I do. I think'It was only after he got off the phone that he let himself wonder, Where will we PUT her?It was obvious to everyone. ~pgs 213-214; Grandma Lynn and Jack;” - Alice Sebold

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

47. “Quite possibly one of the most revealing passages about Shakespeare as a man comes from one of the roughest of the jottings made by gossip John Aubrey from his interview with William Beeston, son of the Christopher Beeston who had acted with Shakespeare's company. The partly cancelled note reads: 'the more to be admired, he was not a company keeper. [He] ... wouldn't be debauched, and if invited to, writ [i.e. wrote] he was in pain.' [Ch.24]” - Ian Wilson

48. “Ale, man, Ale's the stuff to drink,for fellows whom it hurts to think.” - A.E. Housman

49. “When you quit drinking you stop waiting.” - Caroline Knapp

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

51. “Here, drink your liqueur," Henry said, tossing back her drink. "I carry it with me everywhere because it's the only kind of drink that Leo doesn't like, so there's a chance I'll still have some tomorrow.” - Eloisa James

52. “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

53. “For he was drinking too much. Not uncontrollably nor offensively, but still he seldom seemed to have a glass out of his hand.” - Rosamunde Pilcher

54. “The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.” - Roald Dahl

55. “She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?” - Toni Morrison

56. “And in my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne, and am therefore not an alcoholic.” - Augusten Burroughs

57. “Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs.” - Douglas Adams

58. “Mulled ale for the frozen man,And mulled ale for the weary:For mulled ale is the body's friendAnd makes the sick heart merry.” - Frans G. Bengtsson

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

60. “Taking a couple short backup swigs, Flint’s crippling headache started to release its grip, sort of the way he imagined an octopus would release an inedible bowling ball.” - Cole Alpaugh

61. “A fine young man and a fine young felly he always was, except that in the old days, before you began coming in here, Mr. Witherwax, he maybe had too much money and spent too much of it on girls. Take them alone, either one; the money without the women, or a good girl without the money that can be a help to a young felly, and he's fixed for life. But put them together; and often as not, the young felly goes on the booze. ("The Better Mousetrap")” - Fletcher Pratt

62. “If you ever know a man who tries to drown his sorrows, kindly inform him his sorrows know how to swim.” - Pittacus Lore

63. “When you paint late at night, drinking beer or wine or both, you gotta be very careful to watch what you are doing...” - Hiroko Sakai

64. “Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.” - James Crumley

65. “The bar . . . is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable - and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a client that doesn't like to talk.” - Luis Buñuel

66. “Could I have a Sloe Gin Fizz, without the gin?""What's the point of that, Miss?" the waiter said."Tomorrow morning," Mabel said.” - Libba Bray

67. “Imagine a delicious glass of summer iced tea.Take a long cool sip. Listen to the ice crackle and clink.Is the glass part full or part empty?Take another sip.And now?” - Vera Nazarian

68. “Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?” - Graham Greene

69. “- Dzert jums nevajadzēs?Ahā! Andrs tūliņ saprata: apdzirdīt grib! un atteica cieti:- Nē, mēs nedzeram.- Nē, nedzeram, - Bukstiņš apstiprināja. - Tas ir, kādreiz iedzeram ar, bet šovakar mums negribas.” - Andrejs Upīts

70. “Sex mirrored our drinking; both defined our relationship: selfish, detached, indulgent and satisfying.” - BJ Neblett

71. “Drinking Shirley Temple with my Mary Janes on, let's say that every possibility waits” - Lyn Hejinian

72. “There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.” - Ernest Hemingway

73. “All round there was a rising tide of beer, widow Désir's barrels had all been broached, beer had rounded all paunches and was overflowing in all directions, from noses, eyes - and elsewhere. People were so blown out and higgledy-piggledy, that everybody's elbows or knees were sticking into his neighbour and everybody thought it great fun to feel his neighbour's elbows. All mouths were grinning from ear to ear in continuous laughter.” - Émile Zola

74. “Was I on a hangover?” - Miranda Leek

75. “You speak of my drinking, yet you don't know my thirst” - Scottish Proverb

76. “Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven! Thus, let us drink beer!” - Martin Luther

77. “Ever heard the phrase, 'candy is dandy but liquor is quicker?'"Great she wanted to get me drunk."Ah...ever heard of underage!""Where there's a will there's a way," she said, matter-of-factly."That's your great plan?” - Jessica Shirvington

78. “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

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

80. “The whiskey kicked like a mugger.” - Ken Bruen

81. “A sober heart conceals, what a drunken mouth reveals, or in your case, a drunken body and lips.” - Taryn Plendl