Speaking of Bread

Here are 20 great quotations about bread.

1. “The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. “How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?” –Julia Child

3. “Any time a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies.” –Milton Berle

4. “If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a lily.” — Chinese proverb

5. “The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.” –M.F.K. Fisher

6. “Two things only the people desire: bread, and the circus games.” –Juvenal

7. “Give me yesterday’s Bread, this Day’s Flesh, and last Year’s Cyder.” –Benjamin Franklin

8. “I judge a restaurant by the bread and by the coffee.” –Burt Lancaster

9. “Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.” –Pablo Neruda

10. “For less than the cost of a Big Mac, fries and a Coke, you can buy a loaf of fresh bread and some good cheese or roast beef, which you will enjoy much more.” –Steve Albini

11. “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” –Mahatma Gandhi

12. “I like reality. It tastes like bread.” –Jean Anouilh

13. “Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one’s bread to determine which side it is buttered on.” –Ambrose Bierce

14. “Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread. Without it, it’s flat.” –Carmen McRae

15. “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” –W.H. Auden

16. “If I survive, I will spend my whole life at the oven door seeing that no one is denied bread and, so as to give a lesson of charity, especially those who did not bring flour.” –Jose Marti

17. “I am proud to be an American. Because an American can eat anything on the face of this earth as long as he has two pieces of bread.” –Bill Cosby

18. “‘A loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said, ‘is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides are very good indeed.'” –Lewis Carroll

19. “Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.” –Richard Wright

20. “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.” –Omar Khayyam

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Collected by Robert Sietsema for The Village Voice.