The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.

You can't do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

In normal life, 'simplicity' is synonymous with 'easy to do,' but when a chef uses the word, it means 'takes a lifetime to learn.'

The most important knowledge is understanding what you can't do.

The crowd is not us. It never is.

In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do, " but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.

The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali's friends had described to me as the 'myth of Mario' was on a cold Saturday night in January 2002, when I invited him to a birthday dinner.

The Bible attitude is not that God sends sickness or that sickness is of the devil, but that sickness is a fact usable by both God and the devil.

I bet she thought she was getting into a fight with a vanilla wafer on roller skates but little did she know she was getting into a fight with a spider sandwich.

The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.

It seems that nothing ever gets to going good till there's a few resignations

My opposition to the socialist and the other consists in attacking violence as a means of effecting any lasting reform.

You're playing or you're not playing. If you're playing, so just shut up and play.

In fact everything can become a sort of meditation, because in everything there are two dimensions - just as there are in the first breath: the outer and the inner.

In a world where there is so much to grieve and so little good to take? I grieve nothing. I take everything.