Anyone who’s a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: ‚Is it good? Does it give pleasure?‘

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

You don’t come into cooking to get rich.

To a man of pleasure every moment appears to be lost, which partakes not of the vivacity of amusement.

I love Velveeta cheese.

If you like good ol‘ fashion Southern soul food then, yes, I am a good cook! My specialty is chicken dumplings and poke salad.

My mother cooked like a scientist. She had a giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped with, and a cupboard full of spices.

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.

My mom had Julia Child and ‚The Fannie Farmer Cookbook‘ on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

Who bothers to cook TV dinners? I suck them frozen.

The pressure on young chefs today is far greater than ever before in terms of social skills, marketing skills, cooking skills, personality and, more importantly, delivering on the plate. So you need to be strong. Physically fit. So my chefs get weighed every time they come into the kitchen.

I need more sex, OK? Before I die I wanna taste everyone in the world.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

If merely ‚feeling good‘ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink – boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it’s too assertive to the naked eye.

A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.

As a soccer player, I wanted an FA Cup winner’s medal. As an actor you want an Oscar. As a chef it’s three-Michelin’s stars, there’s no greater than that. So pushing yourself to the extreme creates a lot of pressure and a lot of excitement, and more importantly, it shows on the plate.

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

There are no pleasures in a fight but some of my fights have been a pleasure to win.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

When I cook for my family on Christmas, I make feijoada, a South American dish of roasted and smoked meats like ham, pork, beef, lamb, and bacon – all served with black beans and rice. It’s festive but different.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

Barbecue may not be the road to world peace, but it’s a start.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It’s to see my dividends coming in.

I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That’s God talking.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

When one has the feeling of dislike for evil, when one feels tranquil, one finds pleasure in listening to good teachings; when one has these feelings and appreciates them, one is free of fear.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.

I think I should learn French and be a better cook – basic, really good life stuff.

I don’t have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what’s appropriate or attractive.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

When I figured out how to work my grill, it was quite a moment. I discovered that summer is a completely different experience when you know how to grill.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is always a smoke.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

I’m just wanting to make the proper breakfast and keep the house. That’s my passion. At the request of my kids, I’m taking cooking classes. As I go to sleep at night, I think, ‚Did I do a great job as a mom, or was that an average day?‘

The God of this world is riches, pleasure and pride.

Another suggestion is to cook a meal, maybe not every night, but a couple more times a week than you usually do. That way you have leftovers, and you take your lunch to work.

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

I’m interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society. We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it’s quite a satisfying thing to do, isn’t it?

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

Would I swap what I have achieved as a cook if I could have been as successful as a footballer? Definitely.