In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.
Interpretation
People find the most joy at the dining table in specific emotional states: youth, love, or solitude.
This quote suggests that the experiences that bring true happiness at the dining table—whether it be the joy of youth, the passion of being in love, or the introspection that comes from solitude—highlight the deep connections we make with both food and company. Each state evokes different kinds of fulfillment that contribute to our overall sense of happiness.
In practice
During a family gathering, you might use this quote to express the joy of sharing a meal together.
I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless...
It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.
In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.
Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.
There's a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.
...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.
Material objects give rise to physical happiness, while spiritual development gives rise to mental happiness. Since we experience both physical and mental happiness, we need both material and spiritual development. This is why, for our own good and that of society we need to balance material progress with inner development.
I never had everything I wanted, but I never wanted for anything.
No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.
Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of one of his creatures in this world; but that he has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it is what I have steadfastly believed.
Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow.
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