C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Intemperance
Intemperance weaves the winding-sheet of souls.
Allow not nature more than nature needs.
Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune.
Intemperance is a great decayer of beauty.
All learned, and all drunk!
The smaller the drink, the clearer the head.
Gloriously drunk, obey the important call.
Purged from drugs of foul intemperance.
Greatness of any kind has no greater foe than a habit of drinking.
He that tempts me to drink beyond my measure, civilly invites me to a fever.
O, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!
Every inordinate cup is unblessed and the ingredient is a devil.
In our world, death deputes intemperance to do the work of age.
Other vices make their own way; this makes way for all vices. He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.
He calls drunkenness an expression identical with ruin.
Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.
A sensual and intemperate youth hands over a worn-out body to old age.
If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.
Wine displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.
In the bottle discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence.
He is certainly as guilty of suicide who perishes by a slow, as he who is despatched by an immediate, poison.
It is little the sign of a wise or good man, to suffer temperance to be transgressed in order to purchase the repute of a generous entertainer.
It is not fitting that the evil produced by men should be imputed to things; let those bear the blame who make an ill use of things in themselves good.
Intemperance is the epitome of every crime, the cause of every kind of misery.
All the crimes on earth do not destroy so many of the human race, nor alienate so much property, as drunkenness.
In the flowers that wreathe the sparkling bowl, fell adders hiss, and poisonous serpents roll.
Intemperance is a hydra with a hundred heads. She never stalks abroad unaccompanied with impurity, anger, and the most infamous profligacies.
I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking: I could wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment.
In what pagan nation was Moloch ever propitiated by such an unbroken and swift-moving procession of victims as are offered to this Moloch of Christendom, intemperance.
Wise men mingle mirth with their cares, as a help either to forget or overcome them; but to resort to intoxication for the ease of one’s mind is to cure melancholy by madness.
I never drink. I cannot do it, on equal terms with others. It costs them only one day; but me three, the first in sinning, the second in suffering, and the third in repenting.
The bliss of the drunkard is like the expectation of the dying Atheist who hopes no more than to lie down in the grave with the beasts.
The pleasing poison the visage quite transforms of him that drinks, and the inglorious likeness of a beast fixes instead, unmoulding reason’s mintage charactered in the face.
The body oppressed by excess bears down the mind, and depresses to the earth any portion of the divine spirit we had been endowed with.
There is more of turn than of truth in a saying of Seneca, “That drunkenness does not produce but discover faults.” Common experience teaches the contrary. Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses qualities into the mind which she is a stranger to in her sober moments.
Every apartment devoted to the circulation of the glass, may be regarded as a temple set apart for the performance of human sacrifices. And they ought to be fitted up like the ancient temples in Egypt, in a manner to show the real atrocity of the superstition that is carried on within their walls.
The habit of using ardent spirits, by men in office, has occasioned more injury to the public and more trouble to me, than all other causes. And were I to commence my administration again, the first question I would ask, respecting a candidate for office would be, “Does he use ardent spirits?”
Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his color in the cup, when it moveth itself aright; at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.
If the bones of all those who have fallen as a prey to intemperance could be piled up it would make a vast pyramid. Who will gird himself for the journey and try with me to scale this mountain of the dead—going up miles high on human carcasses to find still other peaks far above, mountain above mountain, white with the bones of drunkards.