Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.
Interpretation
The quote critiques both excessive drinkers and total abstainers for misunderstanding the nature of wine.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote highlights a common misconception about wine, suggesting that both those who drink excessively (dipsomaniacs) and those who completely abstain from it fail to recognize wine's potential as a social beverage rather than merely a substance to be consumed for its effects. In doing so, he emphasizes the importance of moderation and understanding the social and cultural role of alcohol, rather than categorizing it solely as a drug.
In practice
In a discussion about social drinking culture, you might quote Chesterton to highlight the nuanced views on alcohol.
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I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
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I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
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The content of your #β character is your #β choice.
Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.
Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
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