
“Muffins should always be eaten quite calmly, as it is the only way to eat them!”
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest
Algernon, Act II
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
“Muffins should always be eaten quite calmly, as it is the only way to eat them!”
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest
self-titled TV comedy special, 1997
Standup routines
“You look as scary as a buttered muffin.”
“One must eat to live, and not live to eat.”
Il faut manger pour vivre, et non pas vivre pour manger.
L'Avare (1668), Act III, sc. i.
Firstly, an inaccurate sourcing: in Act III, yes—but in Scene I, no: rather, in Scene V—HARPAGON, VALÈRE, MASTER JACQUES (see, e.g., the Project Gutenberg HTML version of the English translation: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6923/6923-h/6923-h.htm). Secondly, a misattribution made clear by the Molière text—the character in the play, VAL, obviously points out that the quote refers to a "saying of one of the ancients" (and the quote is precisely written in quotation marks as well), in the full line of dialogue below:
Know, Master Jacques, you and people like you, that a table overloaded with eatables is a real cut-throat; that, to be the true friends of those we invite, frugality should reign throughout the repast we give, and that according to the saying of one of the ancients, "We must eat to live, and not live to eat."
The "ancients" to which VAL/Molière refers is Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, and the oldest known attribution, Socrates (whom Laertius explicitly attributes—and Cicero presumably invokes). Various books of quotations document this—e.g., Elizabeth Knowles' 2006 The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (http://books.google.com/books?id=r2KIvsLi-2kC&dq=%22one+must+eat+to+live+not+live+to+eat%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s) and Jennifer Speake's 1982 A Dictionary of Proverbs (http://books.google.com/books?id=-IpkOkM3IfEC&dq=%22one+must+eat+to+live+not+live+to+eat%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s): the former lists the quote as "a proverbial saying, late 14th century, distinguishing between necessity and indulgence; Diogenes Laertius says of Socrates, 'he said that other men live to eat, but eats to live.' A similar idea is found in the Latin of Cicero, 'one must eat to live, not live to eat'"; the latter, reiterates this. Moreover, in William Shepard Walsh's 1909 Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, he adds that "According to Plutarch, what Socrates said was, 'Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.'" He also adds that Atheneus quotes similarly to Laertius, as well as explores other later variations (http://books.google.com/books?id=hrJkAAAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s).
Misattributed
“I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.”
Source: Written on the Body
“Why can't I just eat my waffle?”
The Expanding Universe (1963)
Context: Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”
So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters an turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these thing. That isn’t the way people write.”
I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.