Banquet

Banquet

A banquet is a large meal or feast. A banquet usually serves a purpose such as a gathering, a ceremony, or a celebration, and is often preceded or followed by speeches.

Quotes

• A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
  • Aesop, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.

• Come when the heart beats high and warm,
  With banquet song, and dance, and wine!
  • Fitz-Greene Halleck, Marco Bozzaris, in memory of the Greek revolutionary hero Markos Botsaris.

• I shall treat the bird as befits him, I shall treat Anzud as befits him. I shall greet his wife affectionately. I shall seat Anzud's wife and Anzud's child at a banquet.
  • Lugalbanda, in Lugalbanda and the Anzud Bird, Ur III Period (21st century BCE).[1]

• Hommes, femmes et enfants, à vous de choisir; vous pouvez rester esclaves dans l'état de colonie, ou devenir indépendant et libre, au milieu des autres peuples qui, de leurs voix toutes puissantes vous convient au banquet des nations.
  • Men, women and children, the choice is yours; you can remain slaves in the state of colony, or become independent and free, amongst the other peoples that, with their powerful voices beckon you to the banquet of nations.
  • Honoré Mercier, speech of April 4, 1893.

• The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.
  • Plato, Republic, 586a

• Born but to banquet, and to drain the bowl.
  • Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer (poetic interpretation, 1725) Book X, Line 662.