Life's Pleasures Quote by Theo Van Gogh

A bravura toast dressed up as a prayer: to live long, yes, but more pointedly to live all the way. “Drink from the goblet of life to the dregs” rejects the hygienic, curated version of adulthood - the one that sips experience, checks the label, and stops before it stings. The line is hungry, theatrical, a little self-mythologizing. The “Ah” at the front matters: it’s not a manifesto so much as a sigh of desire, the way you talk when you know time is real and you’re trying to bargain with it anyway.

Theo van Gogh’s public persona - combative, profane, permanently in argument with Dutch politeness - makes the wish read less like cozy longevity and more like a dare. Eighty-seven is oddly specific: not “old,” but a number you can picture, a finish line you can taunt. It’s also the kind of detail artists use to make a fantasy feel concrete, as if precision might trick fate into compliance.

The subtext hums with risk. To drink “to the dregs” implies accepting what most people avoid: boredom, regret, hangovers, consequences. It’s a creed against soft living, and it carries the fatal irony of someone who built a career on provocation in a culture that tolerates frankness until it doesn’t. Spoken by a director known for weaponizing speech, it also reads as a challenge to the audience: if you want a full life, don’t demand a sanitized one.