Great Quotes about Wine

Wine has been discussed throughout the ages for its properties and effects on human beings.

“Wine can of their wits the wise beguile, make the sage frolic, and the serious smile.”

• Homer
  Attributed author of the epic Greek poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. However, debate continues as to whether Homer actually ever existed.

“Where there is no wine there is no love.”

• Euripides (c. 480 BC-406 BC).
  Greek author of tragedies. Works include Electra and Medea.

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

• Aristophanes (450 BC – 388 BC) from Knights (424 BC)
  Greek comedic writer and satirist.
  
  Works include Lysistrata, a play revolving how women refused to grant their favors to their husbands and barricaded public funds buildings to end the Pelopennesian War (411 BC).

“When asked what wine he liked to drink, he replied, ‘That which belongs to another.’”

• Diogenes Laertius (c. 300?).
  Biographer of Greek philosophers

“The sharper is the berry, the sweeter is the wine.”

• Proverb

“A poor cask often holds good wine.”

• Proverb (Latin)

“Don’t put new wine in old bottles.”

• Proverb (Russia)

“It is well to remember that there are five reasons for drinking: the arrival of a friend, one’s present or future thirst, the excellence of the wine, or any other reason.”

• Proverb (Italian)

“Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for the wine.”

• Benjamin Johnson (1572-1637)
  English actor and poet. Taken from the 1616 poem To Cecilia. Works include Volpone and The Alchemist. Legend has it that he and William Shakespeare were rivals.

“Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tension and more tolerance.”

• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).
  American author, scientist, politician, and diplomat. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Works include Poor Richard’s Almanac.

“Who does not love wine, women, and song remains a fool his whole life long.”

• Johann Heinrich Voss (1751-1826)
  German poet and translator.

“Wine is like sunlight held together like water”

• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642).
  Italian scientist, often called the Father of Modern Science. The Inquisition ordered Galileo imprisoned for his discovery that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the sun revolving around the earth. The sentence was commuted to house arrest.

“In victory, you deserve champagne, in defeat, you need it.”

• Napoleon (1769-1821).
  French military leader who became Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Mediator of the Swiss Confederation, and Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine. Died in exile of stomach cancer, although rumors of arsenic poisoning persisted for many years.

“Tis a pity wine should be so deleterious, for tea and coffee leave us much more serious.”

• Lord Byron (1788-1824).
  Notorious English poet. Works include Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan.

“The flavor of wine is like delicate poetry.”

• Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
  French chemist who developed pasteurization and the first vaccine for rabies.

“My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine. Fortunately, everybody drinks water.”

• Mark Twain (1835-1910)
  American author, humorist, and lecturer. Works include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Roughing It.

“Well, dinner would have been splendid…if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess.”

• Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
  Prime Minister of England from 1940-1945 and from 1951-1995. Received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953.

“I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.”

• W.C. Fields (1880-1946)
  American actor and comic. Works include You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man and My Little Chickadee.

“Wine is the most civilized thing in the world.”

• Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
  American author. Pulitzer Prize winner for The Old Man in the Sea in 1953. Nobel Prize winner in 1954. Works also include The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

“We are all mortals until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.”

• Eduardo Hughes Galeano (1940- )
  Uruguayan journalist and writer

~Laura Evans Staff Editor