On Drinking

"He drank, not as an epicure, but barbarously, with a speed and dispatch altogether American, as if he were performing a homicidal function, as if he had to kill something inside himself, a worm that would not die."
-Baudelaire on E. Allen Poe

"Indeed, I believe if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any class."
-Abraham Lincoln

"First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man."
-Japanese Proverb

"And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man"
-A.E. Housman (1894)

"Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea... Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The glom of an external mourning enwraps every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe."
-Henri-Frederick Amiel (1893)