Life's Pleasures Quote by Matthew Prior

A neat couplet with a hangover hiding inside it: Prior turns “taste” into a moral sense, not a flavor. The first line skewers people who treat drinking as pure intake, a steady sluice gate of sensation with no pause for discernment. If you’re always drinking, you’re never tasting; if you’re always consuming, you’re never noticing. It’s an aphorism about moderation that refuses to sermonize. Instead it weaponizes paradox: excess doesn’t give you more experience, it flattens experience into numb repetition.

The second line sharpens the blade. Talking becomes the verbal equivalent of chugging - constant output that bypasses judgment. “They always talk, who never think” lands because it’s not merely anti-chatter; it’s anti-performance. Prior is pointing at a social type familiar in coffeehouse culture: the loud wit, the perpetual commentator, the person who treats conversation as a sport and reflection as a penalty. The rhyme locks the two habits together, suggesting a single personality pattern: compulsive consumption and compulsive expression, both substitutes for attention.

Context matters. Prior wrote in a Restoration/early-Augustan world obsessed with manners, clubs, and the public stage of sociability. His line reads like etiquette, but the subtext is political and cultural: a warning about a society that prizes convivial noise over private judgment. It’s less “don’t drink” than “don’t live on autopilot.”