If you’re an eater, a foodie, someone who loves to cook, or any combination of the three, you may face a lack of inspiration at times. You might have hit a recipe slump, or perhaps you have a bunch of great new recipes you want to try but no energy. Maybe everything you cook falls apart into a sloppy, doughy mess. Maybe you’re just not that excited by food anymore. Maybe cooking feels like a chore instead of like fun. If that’s the case, then the following quotes are for you. Reignite your love affair with food and embrace all the joy that eating has to offer; after all, “people who love to eat are always the best people,” according to Julia Child.

1. “Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.” ― Orson Welles

2. “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

3. “After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
― Oscar Wilde, “A Woman of No Importance”

4. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” ― Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”

5. “Humor keeps us alive. Humor and food. Don’t forget food. You can go a week without laughing.” ― Joss Whedon

6. “Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.” ― M.F.K. Fisher

7. “Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” ― Mark Twain

8. “The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.” ― Julia Child

9. “And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:
Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.” ― Kahlil Gibran

10. “The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” ― Julia Child

11. “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.” ― H.L. Mencken, “A Book of Burlesques”

12. “You can’t just eat good food. You’ve got to talk about it too. And you’ve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, “Jailbird”

13. “I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.” ― Shauna Niequist, “Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way”

14. “Because cooks love the social aspect of food, cooking for one is intrinsically interesting. A good meal is like a present, and it can feel goofy, at best, to give yourself a present. On the other hand, there is something life affirming in taking the trouble to feed yourself well, or even decently. Cooking for yourself allows you to be strange or decadent or both. The chances of liking what you make are high, but if it winds up being disgusting, you can always throw it away and order a pizza; no one else will know. In the end, the experimentation, the impulsiveness, and the invention that such conditions allow for will probably make you a better cook.”
― Jenni Ferrari-Adler, “Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone”

15. “No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.” ― Laurie Colwin

16. “He showed the words ‘chocolate cake’ to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations.‘Guilt’ was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: ‘celebration.’ ― Michael Pollan, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”

17. “In fact, people who posses not magic at all can instill their home-cooked meals with love and security and health, transforming ingredients and bringing disparate people together as family and friends. There’s a reason that when opening one’s home to guests, the first thing you do is offer food and drink. Cooking is a kind of everyday magic.” ― Juliet Blackwell

18. “The only thing that will make a souffle fall is if it knows you’re afraid of it.” ― James Beard

19. “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” ― Mark Twain

20. “…no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.” ― Julia Child, “My Life in France”

21. “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” ― Charles de Gaulle

22. “The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.” ― Erma Bombeck

23. “All sorrows are less with bread.” ― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

24. “The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.” ― E.M. Forster

25. “It’s all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.” ― Michael Pollan, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”

26. “For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we’ve all had to become disappears, when we’re confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.” ― Anthony Bourdain, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly”

27. “Cooking is not about convenience and it’s not about shortcuts. Our hunger for the twenty-minute gourmet meal, for one-pot ease and prewashed, precut ingredients has severed our lifeline to the satisfactions of cooking. Take your time. Take a long time. Move slowly and deliberately and with great attention.” ― Thomas Keller, “The French Laundry Cookbook”

28. “Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light.” ― Nigel Slater, “The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater”

29. “Give two cooks the same ingredients and the same recipe; it is fascinating to observe how, like handwriting, their results differ. After you cook a dish repeatedly, you begin to understand it. Then you can reinvent it a bit and make it yours. A written recipe can be useful, but sometimes the notes scribbled in the margin are the key to a superlative rendition. Each new version may inspire improvisation based on fresh understanding. It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as all that, but such exciting minor epiphanies keep cooking lively.” ― David Tanis, “Heart of the Artichoke: and Other Kitchen Journeys”

30. “I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.” ― Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest”

31. “Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.” ― Anthony Bourdain, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly”

32. “Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed. Eh bien, tant pis. Usually one’s cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile, and learn from her mistakes.” ― Julia Child, “My Life in France”