Appetite

Appetite is the desire to eat food, felt as hunger. Appetite exists in all higher life-forms, and serves to regulate adequate energy intake to maintain metabolic needs.

I call that mind free, which masters the senses, which protects itself against animal appetites, ... which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness. ~ William Ellery Channing

Quotes

• Within me I had a dearth of that inner food which is thyself, my God—although that dearth caused me no hunger. And I remained without any appetite for incorruptible food—not because I was already filled with it, but because the emptier I became the more I loathed it. Because of this my soul was unhealthy; and, full of sores, it exuded itself forth, itching to be scratched by scraping on the things of the senses.
  • Augustine, Confessions, A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 3, Chapter 1, p. 31

• APPETITE, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• And gazed around them to the left and right
  With the prophetic eye of appetite.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto V, Stanza 50.

• I call that mind free, which masters the senses, which protects itself against animal appetites, which contemns pleasure and pain in comparison to its own energy, which penetrates beneath the body and recognises its own reality and greatness, which passes life, not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.
  • William Ellery Channing, Spiritual Freedom (1830)

• Govern well thy appetite, lest Sin
  Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book VII, line 546.

• Those who let their appetites take hold of them suffer torture and affliction like an enemy held prisoner.
  • John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 1, Chapter 7, Section 2

• Epicurean cooks
  Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite.
  • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1600s), Act II, scene 1, line 24.

• Read o'er this;
  And after, this; and then to breakfast, with
  What appetite you have.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VIII (c. 1613), Act III, scene 2, line 201.

• Now good digestion wait on appetite,
  And health on both!
  • William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act III, scene 4, line 38.

• Who riseth from a feast
  With that keen appetite that he sits down?
  • William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (late 1590s), Act II, scene 6, line 8.

• Doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth, that he cannot endure in his age.
  • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), Act II, scene 3, line 250.

• Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite?
  • William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595), Act I, scene 3, line 296.

• The sweetest honey
  Is loathsome in his own deliciousness,
  And in the taste confounds the appetite.
  • William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act II, scene 6, line 11.

• We have no sympathy with those who are controlled by ideas and passions which we neither understand nor feel. Thus they who live to satisfy the appetites do not believe it possible to live in and for the soul.
  • John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), pp. 239-240

• And through the hall there walked to and fro
  A jolly yeoman, marshall of the same,
  Whose name was Appetite; he did bestow
  Both guestes and meate, whenever in they came,
  And knew them how to order without blame.
  • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1589-96), Book II, Canto IX, Stanza 28.

• Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable. At present, because he is in a midway position between the brute and the truly human, he is always getting bored, depressed, weary of life. He has become so top-heavy with civilisation that he cannot contact the springs of pure vitality. Control of the prefrontal cortex will change all of this. He will cease to cast nostalgic glances towards the womb, for he will realise that death is no escape. Man is a creature of life and the daylight; his destiny lies in total objectivity.
  • Colin Wilson in The Philosopher's Stone, p. 317-318 (1969)

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 36.

• His thirst he slakes at some pure neighboring brook,
  Nor seeks for sauce where Appetite stands cook.
  • Charles Churchill, Gotham III, line 133.

• I find no abhorring in my appetite.
  • John Donne, Devotion.

• L'anima mia gustava di quel cibo,
  Che saziando di sè, di sè s'asseta.
  • My soul tasted that heavenly food, which gives new appetite while it satiates.
  • Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio XXXI, 128.

• Keen appetite
  And quick digestion wait on you and yours.
  • John Dryden, Cleomenes, Act IV, scene 1.

• My appetite comes to me while eating.
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Of Vanity, Book III, Chapter IX. Same saying by Amyot and Jerome.

• Put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite.
  • Proverbs, XXIII. 2.

• "L'appétit vient en mangeant," disoit Angeston, "mais la soif s'en va en beuvant."
  • "Appetite comes with eating," says Angeston, "but thirst departs with drinking."
  • François Rabelais, Works, Book I, Chapter V. (Angeston was Jerome le Hangeste, doctor and scholar, who died 1538).

• Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life—a firmness of mind and mastery of appetite.
  • Seneca the Younger, Epistles, XX.

• Young children and chickens would ever be eating.
  • Thomas Tusser, Points of Huswifery, Supper Matters, V.

See also

• Desire
• Hunger
• Self-control