Life's Pleasures Quote by Raymond Chandler

Chandler’s line is a toast raised with a sneer: not to drunkenness as pleasure, but drunkenness as prophylactic against self-importance. The joke lands because it borrows the language of moral seriousness - “just on principle” - and applies it to an act normally filed under bad judgment. That inversion is classic Chandler: hard-boiled prose that treats virtue and vice as neighboring barstools.

The intent isn’t really “everyone should drink.” It’s an attack on the kind of man who uses restraint as a status marker. “Snotty” is the tell: a blunt, bodily word for a social sin. Chandler suggests that dignity, when it calcifies, turns into a performance, and that a controlled fall from grace can puncture the pose. Getting drunk twice a year is framed as deliberate self-sabotage: a scheduled reminder that you are not above appetite, embarrassment, or needing help home. Humiliation, in small doses, becomes character maintenance.

Context matters. Chandler wrote in a mid-century masculine culture where the bar doubled as confessional, office, and battleground. In his Los Angeles, everyone is selling an image; the private eye’s job is to see through it. The quip carries that worldview into a personal ethic: take yourself down a peg before life does it for you. There’s also a faint moral weariness behind the wit. Chandler’s characters live among hypocrisy dressed up as respectability; the line treats a hangover as a cheaper antidote than sanctimony.