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.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
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.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
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.
Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality.
Better use has been made of association and this powerful instrument of action has been applied for more varied aims in America than anywhere else in the world.
Racism is a physical experience.
I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being aloneβa-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.
Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.
If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing?
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