Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
Interpretation
Alcohol leads to empty words, losing their significance once clarity returns.
This quote highlights the idea that words spoken while intoxicated lack depth and meaning, as they are often influenced by altered states of mind. Just as darkness dissipates with the dawn, so too do the fleeting sentiments expressed under the influence of alcohol vanish, revealing the hollow nature of such utterances.
In practice
During a discussion about the effects of alcohol, one might refer to this quote to emphasize how intoxication can lead to meaningless conversations.
Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.
What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.
I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one Iβm waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name Iβll never know.
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.
A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
I put my head out of my window and see how much the windβs knife wants to slice it off. On this unseen guillotine, Iβve placed the eyeless head of all my desires.
Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows β it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces.
The U.S. immigration laws are bad - really, really bad. I'd say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government's name.
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