Famous Thoughts: Food, Dieting, and Eating

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)

His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973), The Hobbit

You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients.

Julia Child (1912 - )

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Man and Superman (1903) act 1

It's amazing how pervasive food is. Every second commercial is for food. Every second TV episode takes place around a meal. In the city, you can't go ten feet without seeing or smelling a restaurant. There are 20 foot high hamburgers up on billboards. I am acutely aware of food, and its omnipresence is astounding.

Adam Scott, The Monkey Chow Diaries, June 2006

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.

George Miller

LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food; sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites.

Henry Fielding (1707 - 1754)

Our minds are like our stomachs; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetites.

Quintilian

You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.

Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004), quoted in Observer, March 29 1981

If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.

Johnny Carson (1925 - 2005)

Getting my lifelong weight struggle under control has come from a process of treating myself as well as I treat others in every way.

Oprah Winfrey (1954 - ), O Magazine, August 2004

Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?

Tom Hanks (1956 - ), Esquire, June 2006

Miserable mortals who, like leaves, at one moment flame with life, eating the produce of the land, and at another moment weakly perish.

Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Iliad

Chew before you swallow.

George W. Bush (1946 - ), On TV, about his passing out eating a pretzel

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

Arnold Bennett