And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."
Interpretation
This quote humorously expresses the idea that priorities can be skewed during difficult times.
In this quote, Chesterton uses the character of Noah to humorously illustrate how people can sometimes become fixated on trivial issues when faced with more significant challenges. It suggests that in times of crisis, such as an impending flood, one might worry about the quality of their wine instead of the water threatening their safety, highlighting a quirky human tendency to cling to the comforts of life even amidst chaos.
In practice
During a toast at a wedding, one might quote this line to reflect on the importance of enjoying life's pleasures despite challenges.
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.
I've seen racism in my audiences. For example, I've seen people laugh at every other group, but then clam up when it comes to their community. You can't laugh at everyone else and then not laugh at yourself. You shouldn't be at my show if you can't laugh at yourself.
Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.
On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!''
When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe. When I hear someone I don't respect talking about an austere, unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself. When I come across stuff like that and remember about the figs and bananas, I want to snigger uneasily. You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that, watch out.
I'm like a backward berry, Unripened on the vine, For all my friends are fifty, And I'm only forty-nine.
Do I perform sometimes in a manic style? Yes. Am I manic all the time? No. Do I get sad? Oh yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh yeah.
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