Alcohol - Quotes

A drunkard is like a whiskey-bottle, all neck and belly and no head. - Austin O’Malley

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

Alcohol addiction stunts the spiritual, emotional and mental growth of a person. For the alcoholic, they literally stop wanting to learn or advance themselves on any level other than the one they are already on. This is why many alcoholics are emotionally stunted and are unable to contain their emotions. Many alcoholics believe that once they are sober for a few months they are cured. Nothing could be further from the truth. An alcoholic is not cured just because they stopped drinking. Remember, "the drinking" for the alcoholic is only a symptom of an underlying problem within him or her. Total sobriety takes more than abstinence –  it takes a spiritual and mental awareness through healing and growth. I have never yet read about, or heard of a case where an alcoholic stopped drinking, but then years later they were able to drink one or two drinks and stop. - Angie Lewis

Alcohol is among humankind's oldest pleasures, so highly regarded that the ancient Greeks and Romans called wine a ‘gift from the gods.’ - Nigel Denby

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. - Willa Cather

Alcoholism is a disease of the whole person. - Maurice Gelinas

Alcoholism is a well-documented pathological reaction to unresolved grief. - David Cook

Alcoholism is not a symptom of underlying problems. It is an illness in and by itself, producing its own symptoms. Before the onset of the disease alcoholism, the excessive drinking of alcoholic liquor generally is symptomatic of underlying problems. Once the line has been crossed and the drinker has become an alcoholic drinker, his drinking is then symptomatic of that illness. - Maurice Gelinas

All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and mad. In fine, he that is drunk is not a man: because he is so long void of Reason, that distinguishes a Man from a Beast. - William Penn

An aching head and trembling limbs, which are the inevitable effects of drinking, disincline the hands from work. - George Washington

As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them. - Robin Williams

Because alcohol is encouraged by our culture, we get the idea that it isn't dangerous. However, alcohol is the most potent and most toxic of the legal psychoactive drugs. - Beverly A. Potter & Sebastian Orfali

Beware of Drunkenness, lest all good men beware of you. - Wellins Calcott

Drink does not drown Care, but waters it, and makes it grow faster. - Benjamin Franklin

Drunkenness being nothing but a voluntary madness, it emboldens men to undertake all sorts of mischief; it both irritates wickedness and discovers it; it does not only make men vicious, but shows them to be so; and the end of it is either shame or repentance. - Wellins Calcott

Drunkenness is temporary suicide. - Bertrand Russell

For most normal folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship and colourful imagination. It means release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good. But not so with us in those last days of heavy drinking. - Unknown

He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice. - Wellins Calcott

I don’t say that the drunk man is the real man, and the sober man merely a shell. But you find out something different about people when they're drunk. Of course, you sometimes find that they're not different at all – that you merely get more of the same, perhaps said rather more loudly and incoherently, but basically the same. - Kingsley Amis

If alcoholism is a disease, it is a strange one, because the alcoholic is the most direct cause of his or her own sickness. If alcoholism is not a disease, then what else might it be?... If alcoholism is defined as a personal failure or a moral weakness, alcoholics are less likely to be viewed with sympathy and compassion. They might be admonished to quit drinking, be put in prison, or be punished in some other way. These responses to their alcoholism would be administered primarily by the legal system rather than the health care system, as medical interventions are not designed to remedy moral failings. - Wayne Weiten 

In my lowest moments, the only reason I didn't commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn't be able to drink any more if I was dead. - Eric Clapton

Let us be clear and concise on this point: Alcoholism is a disease. We can never be cured of alcoholism, but we can arrest the disease and pull it up on its tracks. There is no such thing as a cured alcoholic or an ex-alcoholic. They simply don't exist ... the recovering alcoholic is only ever one drink away from relapse. - Tyrone Patrick Fahey

Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past. - Gene Wolfe

Most recovering alcoholics in early sobriety have trouble believing they'll ever have fun again but if they hang in there, it’s amazing how good life can become. - Elizabeth Zelvin

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane. Respect rather than fear. There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

One key symptom of alcoholism is that the individual comes to need a drink for every mood – one to calm down, one to perk up, one to celebrate, one to deal with disappointment, and so on. - Phyllis A. Balch

One of the most important facts to remember about alcoholism is its progression. Alcoholism begins in an early stage that looks nothing at all like a life-threatening disease, proceeds into a middle stage where problems begin to appear and intensify, and gradually advances into the late, degenerative stages of obvious physiological dependence, physical and psychological deterioration, and loss of control. - William F. Asbury

Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. - Unknown

The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The first step toward recovery from alcoholism is the recognition that a problem exists. Once the problem drinker breaks through denial and admits to having a problem, a range of treatment options become available. - Jeffrey S. Nevid

The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death. - Unknown

The point in regard to alcohol is simple enough. It is a poison, and a poison which, like other poisons, has certain uses; but the limitations in the use of alcohol should be as strict as the limitations in the use of any other kind of poison. Moreover, it is an insidious poison in that it produces effects which seem to have only one antidote – alcohol again. - Alexander Alison

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

To dispute with a drunkard is to debate with an empty house. - Publilius Syrus

To understand why alcoholism is a disease, it is important to know about the neurological effects of alcohol on the brain. Simply put, heavy drinking over time causes changes in neurotransmitter activity that the brain must adapt to. In people physically predisposed to alcoholism, this adaptation eventually turns into a fixed craving as the body finds it cannot live without the effects of alcohol. Something that started out voluntarily and enjoyable turns into something more serious – a physical dependence that can cause horrible withdrawal symptoms. This explains why alcoholics cannot just quit drinking like their non-addicted counterparts can. Thus, it is not the behaviour of drinking that is defined as an illness. It is only when the craving to drink becomes involuntary that alcoholism can be thought of as a disease. - Maria Gifford

Where Drunkenness reigns, there Reason is an exile, virtue a stranger, God an enemy, blasphemy is wit, Oaths are rhetoric, and secrets are proclamations. - Wellins Calcott

Wine hath drowned more men than the sea. - Thomas Fuller