"Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank"
About this Quote
A paradox this clean is a kind of dare: take the most ordinary stimulant in modern life and flip it into a lullaby. Allais, a fin-de-siecle French humorist with a taste for logical traps, builds the joke on a grammar glitch that feels like philosophy. Coffee “puts one to sleep” not when consumed, but when absent. The line mimics the solemn cadence of a scientific maxim, then undercuts it with a petty truth about dependence: what wakes you up today becomes the thing you can’t function without tomorrow.
The intent is less to praise coffee than to needle the way people narrate their habits as necessities. Allais treats the body like a bureaucrat: it files coffee under “required paperwork,” and if the form doesn’t arrive, operations shut down. That’s the subtext of modern routine before “caffeine addiction” became a wellness buzzword. He’s also poking at language itself, showing how a tiny syntactic turn can create a new reality. The sentence is technically coherent, but its logic is socially engineered: the “cause” is not coffee, but the ritual of coffee.
Context matters. Late 19th-century cafe culture was where newspapers, politics, and art mingled; coffee was both fuel and identity. Allais compresses that whole scene into one sly inversion: the beverage that signals alertness becomes, through habituation and self-mythology, the agent of fatigue. It’s a joke with teeth, because it lands on a familiar anxiety: what if our daily “boosts” are just debts coming due?
The intent is less to praise coffee than to needle the way people narrate their habits as necessities. Allais treats the body like a bureaucrat: it files coffee under “required paperwork,” and if the form doesn’t arrive, operations shut down. That’s the subtext of modern routine before “caffeine addiction” became a wellness buzzword. He’s also poking at language itself, showing how a tiny syntactic turn can create a new reality. The sentence is technically coherent, but its logic is socially engineered: the “cause” is not coffee, but the ritual of coffee.
Context matters. Late 19th-century cafe culture was where newspapers, politics, and art mingled; coffee was both fuel and identity. Allais compresses that whole scene into one sly inversion: the beverage that signals alertness becomes, through habituation and self-mythology, the agent of fatigue. It’s a joke with teeth, because it lands on a familiar anxiety: what if our daily “boosts” are just debts coming due?
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite | Cite this Quote |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Allais, Alphonse. (2026, January 17). Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/coffee-is-a-beverage-that-puts-one-to-sleep-when-35914/
Chicago Style
Allais, Alphonse. "Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/coffee-is-a-beverage-that-puts-one-to-sleep-when-35914/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/coffee-is-a-beverage-that-puts-one-to-sleep-when-35914/. Accessed 3 Feb. 2026.
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