Of Drunkenness

The world is full of excuses made for vice, and those who cannot bear to see it plainly call it by other names. Drunkenness, among the rest, seems to me a brutish and beastly fault, and yet the mind does not resist it as vigorously as others. For we find many a great man whom fame has preserved untouched, who has been subject to it more than a little. Cato, the censor and the corrector of others, was reproached for it. Alexander the Great was so given to it that he killed Cleitus, his most beloved friend, in a fit of drunken fury — and his remorse afterward was so great that he nearly died of grief. But the wine was already poured.

There are those who pretend to honor the vice by company, as if drinking were a kind of courage. I have never been able to think it so. I like my wine, but I like my reason more. The pleasure of eating and drinking is one of the first and last, and the one that never deserts us. But reason is the first thing drunkenness banishes, and reason is the one thing I least care to be without. Let others have their fury and their oblivion — I prefer to find what I look for in full daylight.

Even virtue itself is so impure that it cannot bear the light of full examination; drunkenness at least is honest about being a fool.

I am fortunate in my nature: I have little desire for excess at table, and find little pleasure in quantities beyond what satisfies. A single cup of good wine, taken with company and unhurried conversation, is worth more to me than all the heroic binges of the ancients. The belly is a foolish master to serve too devoutly. I do not say this to preach at others — let each man drink as his nature inclines him. I say it only because to write of oneself honestly one must account for the vices one has escaped as well as those one has not.