Dining Quotes

“But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals
Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten...”
― Nick Cave

“I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“The trouble with eating Italian is that 5 or 6 days later, you're hungry again.”
― George Miller

“we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end.
CLAUDIUS Alas, alas.
HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this?
HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.”
― William Shakespeare

“There is a difference between dining and eating. Dining is an art. When you eat to get most out of your meal, to please the palate, just as well as to satiate the appetite, that,my friend, is dining.”
― Yuan Mei

“To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Celebrity chefs are the leaders in the field of food, and we are the led. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?”
― Charles Clover, The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat

“I think you will agree the sign of a civilised society is a regular dining schedule.”
― Philippa Ballantine, Phoenix Rising

“English people don’t like to be told ‘enjoy your meal’. They will enjoy their meal if they feel like enjoying it. It is advisable not to command them such things in case they have other plans with their meal, such as preferring to dislike it.”
― Angela Kiss, How to Be an Alien in England: A Guide to the English

“THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF GASTRONOMY

There's a rule for proper doses
in the dinner-eaters lore:
one should stop the filling process
while one still has room for more.

And if someone at the table
had reminded me before -
Hallelujah! I'd be able
to absorb a little more.”
― Piet Hein

“I have heard that the French like to say," Nobody grows old during a happy occasion at the dining table. "With such wonderful family and friends all around us for Mitchell's and Stacie's wedding, I know their love will always stay young and true to one another, because of the love and happiness we all have in this room today!”
― James Hauenstein

“The dining-room was curiously impersonal, like all places where people eat,—perhaps because food is our chief link with the common chaos of matter rolling about us.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

“Do you usually dine alone?" I asked.
"No," he said. "I always dine with a book.”
― M.R.C. Kasasian, The Mangle Street Murders

“The dinner-table is often the terrain of critical conversations, for it is there one has the better of one's interlocutor. There is no escape without scandal, there is no turning aside without self-betrayal. To invite a person to dinner is to place them under observation. Every dining-room is a temporary prison where politeness chains the guests to the laden board.”
― Maurice Renard, Hands of Orlac

“The autocorrect on my phone must be a pacifist. Every time I type ''going to war'', it changes it to ''going to eat.'' Either that or it's getting kickbacks from the local restaurants.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Mastership of great culinary skills enriches the wholeness of a fine dining experience.”
― Wayne Chirisa

“To be at table means that one has removed oneself from business and motion and made a commitment to spend some time over one's meal. One commits oneself not only to time but also to an implicit plan of eating: We sit to eat and not just to feed, and to do so both according to a plan and with others. A decision to have a sit-down meal must precede its preparation, and the preparation is in turn guided by the particular plan that is the menu. Further, to be at table means, whether we know it or not, to make a commitment to form and formality. We agree, tacitly to be sure, to a code of conduct that does not apply when we privately raid the refrigerator or eat on the run or in our cards, or even when we munch sandwiches in front of the television with our buddies who have gathered to watch the Super Bowl. There we eat (or, more accurately, feed) side by side, as at a trough; in contrast, at table we all face not our food but one another. Thus we silently acknowledge our mutual commitment to share not only some food but also commensurate forms of commensal behavior. To be sure, the forms will vary depending on the occasion; the guests, a banquet table at a testimonial dinner, and a picnic table in the park have different degrees and (in part) different kinds of formality, as do also the family breakfast and the family dinner. But in all cases there are forms that operate, regulate, and inform our behavior and that signify our peculiarly human way of meeting necessity.”
― Leon R. Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature

“Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.
[On British railway dining cars]”
― Simon Bradley, The Railways: Nation, Network and People

“Michelin Star? I’d rather chew a French rubber tyre.”
― Fennel Hudson, Fine Things: Fennel's Journal No. 8

“Dinner was a comedy of diplomacy.”
― Michael Crichton

“Working lunch is the art of gorging in five star delicacies all the while spitting out fancy business jargons”
― Nipun Varma, Adventures of an Indian Techie

“Black Dress” By Charmaine J Forde

She likes fine wines and the great outdoors,
Surf boarding from dust to dawn,
Summertime dining in Lexington and Texas,
She prefers first class- no need for the Lexus
Some say this beauty never takes a rest,
A million dollar smile in a short black dress”
― Charmaine J Forde

“Keeping" best "dinner sets for use only when you have guests comes with the assumption that unless it is a" special occasion ", you do not deserve to eat off them. This is a subtle dig that goes right to the core of your self-esteem. Are you alone not deserving of the best?”
― Michelle Ogundehin, Happy Inside: How to harness the power of home for health and happiness

“A book at the table, just as in all places, is never rude.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“...We have from the start been singing the virtues of necessity -- our bodily neediness -- can not only be humanized; meeting it knowingly and deliberately can also be humanizing. For those who understand both the meaning of eating and their own hungry soul, necessity becomes the mother of the specifically human virtues: freedom, sympathy, moderation, beautification, taste, liberality, tact, grace, wit, gratitude, and finally, reverence.
The perfections of our nature are multiple. Accordingly, one should not expect that a single form of humanized eating will embody and nourish them all. Indeed, we have in this book visited a variety of dining forms that manifest in different ways the elevated faces of our humanity: feeding the stranger at our hearth; the well-mannered family supper; the convivial and witty dinner party; the inspiriting feast of the genius Babette; the wisdom-seeking symposium of Plato; the reverent ritual meal. Some forms of dining accentuate the just, others the noble, still others the playful, the artistic, the philosophic, or the pious. Yet each one reveals a common dignified humanity, differently accented and highlighted. Each displays what it means to be the truly upright and thoughtful animal.”
― Leon R. Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature

“Stafford's Law of Dining Out states that the second you finish ordering something in a restaurant, food will immediately arrive at an adjacent table that looks ten times better.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Nevertheless, I'm not sure I can quite express what is so basic, so right, so utterly human about cooking and eating together. As far back as you can go in history, you find human beings gathering around tables for the purpose of eating together. Offering food and water is an instinctive act of courtesy in almost every culture around the world. In the Bible and Jewish-Christian tradition, breaking bread together is perhaps both the humblest and the most meaningful reflection of unity.”
― Joshua Becker, The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life

“A lot of people who behave well at the table do so only when a special guest is around.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Water goes hand in hand with food, just like children and crying.”
― John Joclebs Bassey, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“I'm not sure which knife on my place mat is for cutting the tension”
― Sher Lee, Fake Dates and Mooncakes