Sober Man Quotes

#1. Feeling like the last sober man in a crazed nation that ran on booze.

Steve Toltz

#2. A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#3. Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.

R. Scott Bakker

#4. Come swish around my pretty punk
And keep me dancing still
That I may stay a sober man
Although I drink my fill.

William Butler Yeats

#5. Last time I was sober, man I felt bad,
Worst hangover that I ever had.
It took six hamburgers, Scotch all night,
Nicotine for breakfast just to put me right.

Mark Knopfler

#6. It is vain for the sober man to knock at poesy's door.

Plato

#7. That which the sober man keeps in his breast, the drunken man lets out at the lips. Astute people, when they want to ascertain a man's true character, make him drunk.

Martin Luther

#8. Whatsoever is in the heart of the sober man, is in the mouth of the drunkard.

John Lyly

#9. If there is a form of government, then, whose principle and foundation is virtue, will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form?

John Adams

#10. How many a father have I seen, A sober man, among his boys, Whose youth was full of foolish noise.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

#11. He looked at her as if she were already one of the ugly nameless bodies in the mortuary, and with a medical man's sober, somewhat cynical mind, he saw her in front of him, stripped and sliced open. That was his revenge. He caught himself regarding the whole world in that way.

Erik Fosnes Hansen

#12. I mean, the more a man was in the Devil's power, the less he would be aware of it, on the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he's drunk.

C.S. Lewis

#13. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The

Karl Marx

#14. Abruptly, with the shock of the Conquest, the sober and puritanical man of the Christian Inquisition encountered, through their violent and upsetting nature, peoples who through their rituals were identified with the gods.

Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

#15. It's difficult to talk about, you know, my inadequacies, my inability to stay sober when I'm a relatively bright man and I've had a lot of great blessings and a lot of great opportunities.

Daniel Baldwin

#16. Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed.

Charles Lamb

#17. Burns had his faults, his frailties. He was intensely human. Still, I would rather appear at the "Judgment Seat" drunk, and be able to say that I was the author of "A man's a man for 'a that," than to be perfectly sober and admit that I had lived and died a Scotch Presbyterian.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#18. The clouds that gather round the setting sun, Do take a sober colouring from an eye, That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.

William Wordsworth

#19. Drunk, he was leering and silent and mostly asleep. Sober, he was a watcher, a horror of a man who missed nothing and commented on everything. Nothing was ever done right or cooked right or handed to him properly or ironed straight or finished off fully with him.

Donal Ryan

#20. 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

#21. Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.

William James

#22. Let a man be ne'er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.

Jonathan Swift

#23. He believed a man should never be sober but never be drunk. And he believed in watching out for family, even if you had to stay sober for a few hours; it was that important.

Allan Dare Pearce

#24. For hardly any man dances when sober, unless he is insane. Nor does he dance while alone, nor at a respectable and moderate party. Dancing is the final phase of a wild party with fancy decorations and a multitude of delights.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#25. An honest man, that is not quite sober, has nothing to fear.

Joseph Addison

#26. The attack of a man, equipped with erudition, and of perfectly sober judgment, on cherished beliefs and revered institutions, must always excite the interest, by irritating the passions, of men.

Edward Gibbon

#27. Why now that he's sober and thoughtful, and living as a good man, does he get in the worst trouble of his life?

Louise Erdrich

#28. I don't think a man who is fifteen years younger than me should tell me he is proud of me unless he is my sober coach or my time-travel dad.

Amy Poehler

#29. Prudence must not be expected from a man who is never sober.
[Lat., Non est ab homine nunquam sobrio postulanda prudentia.]

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#30. To contemplation's sober eye,
Such is the race of man;
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began,
Alike the busy and the gay,
But flutter through life's little day.

Thomas Gray

#31. Just as the banqueteers are drunk from wine, the citizens are drunk from fears, hopes, desires, and aversions and are therefore in need of being ruled by a man who is sober.

Leo Strauss

#32. Dillon kept his face impassive, his heart just racing. He had him. He knew where Dal was, and he was going to go there and fuck the man sober. And when Dal couldn't walk straight, then they were going to talk.

Sean Michael

#33. Could man be drunk for ever With liquor, love, or fights, Lief should I rouse at morning And lief lie down of nights. But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts.

A.E. Housman

#34. The man who says, 'my country right or wrong' is like the man who says, 'my mother drunk or sober'

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#35. Nothing in Nature's sober found,
But an eternal Health goes round.
Fill up the Bowl then, fill it high
Fill all the Glasses there; for why
Should every Creature Drink but I?
Why, Man of Morals, tell me why?

Abraham Cowley

#36. The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.

Charles Lamb

#37. That whatever a man says, promises, or resolves in passion he must stick to later on when he is cold and sober
this demand is among the heaviest burdens that weigh on humankind.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#38. I'm sober."
"That's not my concern. I know you'll never make that mistake again."
"Then what's your concern?" the younger man asked, his tone aggressive.
"You and her.

Erika Johansen

#39. No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#40. What a man says when drunk, he thought about whilst sober.

Nana Awere Damoah

#41. A man's ability cannot possibly be of one sort and his soul of another. If his soul be well-ordered, serious and restrained, his ability also is sound and sober. Conversely, when the one degenerates, the other is contaminated.

Seneca The Younger

#42. Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

Harry Crews

#43. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

George Bernard Shaw

#44. My benefactor used to say the seeds are the 'sober head'
the only part that could fortify the heart of man.

Carlos Castaneda

#45. The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.

Henry David Thoreau

#46. Had [Winston Churchill] been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.

Anthony Storr

#47. I wish I was a man. A man can do so many things. He can go to sea. He can be a soldier. He can fly. He can crawl in and out of beds. He can get drunk and into messes. Then all he has to do is sober up and take a bath and no one thinks less of him".

Day Keene

#48. Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself,
like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#49. 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 dualities into the mind which she is a stranger to in her sober moments.

Joseph Addison

#50. Not being a man of means, I knew that if I did not stay sober enough to earn money, I would run out of liquor.

Alcoholics Anonymous

#51. All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.

John Adams

#52. He was your usual man when it came to romance, which is to say he couldn't recite Baa Baa Black Sheep when sober, whereas when drunk, sixteen cantos of Byron's Don Juan was par for the course.

Tyne O'Connell

#53. Pride never sleeps. The principle at least is always awake. An intemperate man is sometimes sober, but a proud man is never humble.

Hannah More

#54. If the [Vestiges] be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!

Adam Sedgwick

#55. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.

Samuel Johnson

#56. There never was a man of solid understanding, whose apprehensions are sober, and by a pensive inspection advised, but that he hath found by an irresistible necessity one true God and everlasting being.

Walter Raleigh

#57. Now, then, young lady. Which of these gentlemen will you marry?"
"This one." She squeezed [his] arm.
The vicar inspected [him] and sniffed. "Doesnt look that much different from the other one."
"Nevertheless"- she fought to remain sober-faced- "this is the man I want.

Elizabeth Hoyt

#58. The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough; it is slippery. Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed. A man must stay sober; not always, but most of the time.

Clarence Day