Daily Inspiration Quote by Luis Bunuel

Bunuel treats the aperitif like a cultural canary: small, fizzy, and suddenly gone, which is exactly why the line stings. He’s not mourning a drink so much as the evaporation of a certain tempo of living. The aperitif is a ritual that makes space for anticipation, for conversation that isn’t yet a negotiation, for appetite as a social art. When its “decline” becomes “one of the most depressing phenomena of our time,” the exaggeration is the point: a sly provocation that forces you to notice how modern life erases the in-between moments that used to humanize it.

As a director who built a career on puncturing bourgeois comfort, Bunuel’s intent isn’t nostalgic purring; it’s a sideways attack. The aperitif belongs to a world of manners and leisure, the very world he loved to satirize. By framing its disappearance as tragedy, he’s both mocking and lamenting: mocking the bourgeois tendency to treat lifestyle as destiny, lamenting that even those flimsy rituals once provided a commons, a shared script. What replaces it is implied: efficiency, solitary consumption, the hurried meal, the transaction disguised as relaxation.

Context matters: Bunuel moved between Spain, Mexico, and France, watching Europe’s prewar salon culture harden into postwar consumer modernity. In his films, dinner parties collapse into surreal violence and desire precisely because the ritual can’t contain what it pretends to civilize. Here, the joke lands because it’s not really about alcohol. It’s about the loss of civilized delay - and the suspicion that without it, we get hungrier, meaner, and easier to manage.