Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin quotes

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was a French lawyer, politician, and celebrated gastronome, renowned for his influential writings on food and taste. His book "The Physiology of Taste" is regarded as a foundational text in gastronomic literature. He helped shape the philosophy of gastronomy and is remembered as one of the great thinkers on culinary culture. Here are 23 of his quotes:

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The table is the only place where we do not get weary during the first hour.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The fate of a nation depends on the way that they eat.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Dessert without cheese is like a beauty with only one eye.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Vegetables, which are the lowest in the scale of living things, are fed by roots, which, implanted in the native soil, select by the action of a peculiar mechanism, different subjects, which serve to increase and to nourish them.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Those persons who suffer from indigestion, or who become drunk, are utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Nothing is more pleasant than to see a pretty woman, her napkin well placed under her arms, one of her hands on the table, while the other carries to her mouth, the choice piece so elegantly carved.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The senses are the organs by which man places himself in connexion with exterior objects.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The torrent of centuries rolling over the human race, has continually brought new perfections, the cause of which, ever active though unseen, is found in the demands made by our senses, which always in their turns demand to be occupied.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

I will only observe, that that ethereal sense - sight, and touch, which is at the other extremity of the scale, have from time acquired a very remarkable additional power.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The centuries last passed have also given the taste important extension; the discovery of sugar, and its different preparations, of alcoholic liquors, of wine, ices, vanilla, tea and coffee, have given us flavors hitherto unknown.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The number of flavors is infinite, for every soluble body has a peculiar flavor, like none other.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

I am essentially an amateur medecin, and this to me is almost a mania.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The sense of smell explores; deleterious substances almost always have an unpleasant smell.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Hearing, which, by the motion of the air, informs us of the motion of sounding or vibrating bodies.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Sight and touch, being thus increased in capacity, might belong to some species far superior to man; or rather the human species would be far different had all the senses been thus improved.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The sense of smell, like a faithful counsellor, foretells its character.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

All men, even those we call savages, have been so tormented by the passion for strong drinks, that limited as their capacities were, they were yet able to manufacture them.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin