Life's Pleasures Quote by John Stuart Blackie

A neat taxonomy like this doesn’t just sort beverages; it sorts people. Blackie’s line works because it pretends to be a playful proverb while smuggling in a full social hierarchy: gods at the top with wine, “babes” and “women” placed in infantilized domestic tiers, and “beasts” consigned to the moral low ground of water. It’s a joke built on elevation and exclusion, the Victorian parlor trick of turning taste into destiny.

The phrasing is deliberately absolutist. Each drink gets a single, total identity, as if culture can be reduced to a menu. That rigidity is the point: it flatters the reader who already drinks wine (and, by implication, is worldly, masculine, and refined) while making alternatives sound not merely different but lesser. Tea’s placement is especially telling. In 19th-century Britain, tea is both ubiquitous and coded as respectable domesticity - a feminized ritual tied to the home and to “proper” behavior. Blackie frames it as a demotion: safe, tame, supervised.

Water as “the drink of beasts” is the sharpest barb because it inverts necessity into contempt. The subtext isn’t about hydration; it’s about suspicion of abstinence and temperance movements that were gaining strength in the period. If you choose water, he implies, you’ve opted out of civilization’s pleasures and the social bonding of the bottle.

What makes the line stick is its weaponized wit: it’s memorable because it’s symmetrical, but it’s persuasive because it converts prejudice into a punchline. The laugh comes with instructions on who deserves it.