Coffee Quotes
from a variety of sources

Coffee has two virtues. It is wet and it is warm.
Old Dutch saying.

"Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine!"
From J.S. Bach's "Coffee Cantata," 1732

"Coffee is the common man's gold, and like gold, it brings to every person the feeling of luxury and nobility." Sheik Abd-al-Kadir, In Praise of Coffee, 1587
 

"Another head - and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time - to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too." D. H. Lawrence, Sea  and Sardinia.

"Give a frontiersman coffee and tobacco, and he will endure any privation, suffer any hardship, but let him be without these two necessaries of the woods, and he becomes irresolute and murmuring." U.S. Army Lt. William Whiting in 1849

"Coffee is real good when you drink it it gives you time to think. It's a lot more than just a drink; it's something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup. " Gertrude Stein

"Last comes the beverage of the Orient shore,
Mocha, far off, the fragrant berries bore.
Taste the dark fluid with a dainty lip,
Digestion waits on pleasure as you sip."
Pope Leo XII

"A very good drink they call Chaube that is almost as black as ink and very good in illness, especially of the stomach. This they drink in the morning early in the open places before everybody, without any fear or regard, out of clay or China cups, as hot as they can, sipping it a little at a time."
German physician and botanist Leonhard Rauwolf in 1582.

"The little campfires, rapidly increasing to hundreds in number, would shoot up along the hills and plains, and as if by magic, acres of territory would be illuminous with them. Soon they would be surrounded by the soldiers, who made it an inevitable rule to cook their coffee first."
John D. Bilings, a Union veteran, in his book, Hardtack and Coffee.

"It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid. Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness."  (Coleman Dowell)

"Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat." Alex Levine

"Strong coffee, much strong coffee, is what awakens me. Coffee gives me warmth, waking, an unusual force and a pain that is not without very great pleasure." Napoleon Bonaparte

"I would rather suffer with coffee than be senseless." Napoleon Bonaparte

"The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun." John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

"I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you're working at home they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn't dream of interrupting on the golf course." Harper Lee

"If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee; it is the intelligent beverage."
Sydney Smith

"Wine is for aging, not coffee."
Ken Hutchinson, Starsky and Hutch

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
T. S. Elliot

"After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed."
Mark Twain, in A Tramp Abroad.

"The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce." Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr.

Nancy Astor (to Winston Churchill): "If I were your wife, I would put poison in your coffee."
Winston Churchill (in reply):"And if I were your husband, I would drink it."

"It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep."
Malcolm X, 196, Message to the Grass Roots

"Make my coffee like I like my men: hot, black, and strong."
Willona Wood, Good Times

"Never drink black coffee at lunch; it will keep you awake in the afternoon."
Jilly Cooper, 1970, How to Survive from Nine to Five

"Resolve to free yourselves from the slavery of the tea and coffee and other slop-kettle."
William Cobbett, 1829, Advise to Young Men

"Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strichnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Old Age

"Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul."
Isak Dinesen, 1934

"Coffee: we can get it anywhere, and get as loaded as we like on it, until such teeth-chattering, eye-bulging, nonsense-gibbering time as we may be classified unable to operate heavy machinery."
Joan Frank, 1991

"Many people are like instant coffee: the minute they get in hot water they dissolve." Anonymous, from Toronto Globe and Mail; July 10, 1993.

"The discovery of coffee has enlarged the realm of illusion and given more promise to hope."  Isidore Bourdon

"The powers of a man's mind are directly proportional to the quantity of coffee he drank." (Sir James MacKintosh  - 18th century philosopher)

"If it wasn't for coffee, I'd have no discernible personality at all." (David Letterman Esquire Interview Fall '94)

"Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovlier than a thousand kisses, sweeter than muscatel wine! I must have my coffee..."  Johann Sebastian Bach (1732, an aria from his 'Kaffee-Kantate')

"You make good coffee . . . You're a slob, but you make good coffee." Cher in "Moonstruck"

"See how special you are? I serve you coffee in the parlor."
From "The Black Orchid"Anthony Quinn to Sophia Loren.

"Why don't you have a cup of coffee at least? I, um, I'm a little low in sugar and I don't have any cream, but it's real coffee." Barbara Streisand to Robert Redford in "The Way We Were"

"I never laugh until I've had my coffee." Clark Gable to Carole Lombard in the only movie they did together, "No Man of Her Own"

"What is this demilitarized zone? Whatever it is, I like it! Gets you on your toes better than a strong cup of cappuccino." Robin Williams in "Good Morning Vietnam"

"Thank you for your coffee, seignor. I shall miss that when we leave Casablanca." Ingrid Bergman in "Casablanca"

"The first cup is for the guest, the second for enjoyment, the third for the sword."
An old Arabic saying.

"The vacuum pot is truly the CD player of coffeemakers; all you taste is the coffee." Corby Kummer, food expert.

"Compared to Clinton, I feel like a loser. I can't even get the intern to make me coffee!" Heard on David Letterman show on 21 Aug 99

"Decaffeinated Coffee. It's useless warm brown water." Again! Heard on David Letterman show on March 2000

"People are kind of like zombies in Hong Kong nowadays. You don't see that glow anymore. In terms of colour Hong Kong looks a bit grey. To counter that, I think we should give out free espresso samples to give people more caffeine; triple espresso with Irish cream syrup, iced! People just need to get a bit more wired."
David Wu, Actor  and Channel V VJ, quoted in Post Magazine 29 August 99.