Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.

I will eat exceedingly, and prophesy.

I don't have anything to nourish me: I eat myself (p109)

The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.

I am hungry for more. I am not satisfied but I am fulfilled.

I regret the time I have been eating instead of being in pursuit of learning - for time is precious.

Eating education is like eating Christmas pudding: Too much can make your stomach sore, too much can spoil your whole Christmas. Learning from a man who learned all he learned from another, can lead you to a safe place, but destroy your sense of wonder. Trapped inside a book, locked inside a lecture, when do you find the time to love and spend your days in forests? And when ideals are fleeting — tell me then who do you turn to? They prove to you that God is dead, but to them you’re just a number.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.

Adam and Eve, placed in the garden of Eden, find themselves forbidden to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). Catholic theologians believe this “knowledge” forbidden by Elohim-Yahweh is neither omniscience nor moral discernment, but the ability to decide what is good or evil. Jewish theology is more subtle. The “tree” of the knowledge is interpreted as the representation of a world where good and evil “are in a combined state,” where there is no absolute Good and Evil. In other words, the “tree” is a foreshadowing of the real world we live in, a world where nothing is absolutely clear cut, where moral imperatives are tied to human values, and where everything of any greatness and importance always takes place beyond good and evil. Furthermore, in the Hebrew tradition “to eat” means “to assimilate.” To eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is therefore to personally enter this real world where human initiative “combines” good and evil. Adam’s transgression, from which all the others are derived, is clearly “that of autonomy,” accordingly, as emphasized by Eisenberg and Abecassis, this would be “the desire to conduct his own history alone in according to his own desire and his own word or law.

One must have lived on such diet to discover what ghastly trouble the necessity of swallowing one's food become.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

I'm sick. I've eaten civilisation and I'm sick.

I believe that we have all at some time eaten the fruit from trees that we did not plant. In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, it behooves us in turn to plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will largely benefit generations to come. I believe this is our sacred responsibility, one that I hope you will shoulder in time.

I had been journeying to and fro on the face of a fine broad bit of English earth, seeking what wages I could earn, what work I could get, and what facts I could devour. I found, I got, I devoured, every morsel which came in my way. I read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, as the prayer book says somewhere, all I could lay my hands or ears or eyes on. At the same time I was taking in a supply of facts which would not be digested—tough facts about the land and the labourer, that accumulated and lay within my mind, heavy as a lump of lead, and hard as a stone. No matter what I did, whether I was working with my hands or my head, that mass of indigestible facts was always in the background, worrying and bothering me. I got no peace; it worried and bothered me more and more as each year went by.