Savor a bite of these inspirational cooking quotes next time you’re procrastinating in the kitchen!
Cooking is a deeply embodied experience. It can stimulate your senses and boost your vitality. It can be therapeutic, energizing, and a memorable way to deepen connections with the people you enjoy.
Sometimes, though, it can feel like a Sisyphean task of manual labor that you will never be done with.
If you know that cooking can provide a host of benefits for you, but you feel less than enthused to get started, these inspirational cooking quotes may be just the thing to nudge you into making your next delicious and fulfilling meal.
Bon appetit!
Inspirational Cooking Quotes about the art of cooking
“Cooking is multisensory. It’s made for the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the ear, and the soul. No other art is as complex.” – Pierre Gagnaire
“The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living.”
– Dione Lucas
“Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!” – Nathan Myhrvold
“A chef is a mixture maybe of artistry and craft. You have to learn the craft really to get there.” – Wolfgang Puck
“Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements.” – Marcel Boulestin
“The art of cooking is a blend of science, creativity, and a dash of love.” – Bobby Flay
“Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for.”
– Andre Simon
“Cooking is an art and patience a virtue . . . Careful shopping, fresh ingredients and an unhurried approach are nearly all you need. There is one more thing – love. Love for food and love for those you invite to your table. With a combination of these things you can be an artist – not perhaps in the representational style of a Dutch master, but rather more like Gauguin, the naïve, or Van Gogh, the impressionist. Plates or pictures of sunshine taste of happiness and love.”
– Keith Floyd
Inspirational Cooking Quotes about cooking as an expression of love
“Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.” – Harriet Van Horne
“The most indispensable ingredient of all good home cooking: love for those you are cooking for.” – Sophia Loren
“Food brings people together on many different levels. It’s nourishment of the soul and body; it’s truly love.” – Giada De Laurentiis
“Cooking is one of the greatest gifts to those you love.”
– Ina Garten
“I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.” – Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way
“The secret ingredient is always love.” – Unknown
Inspirational Cooking Quotes by Famous Chefs
“Cooking is all about people. Food is maybe the only universal thing that really has the power to bring everyone together. No matter what culture, everywhere around the world, people get together to eat.” – Guy Fieri
“It’s not about passion. Passion is something that we tend to overemphasize, that we certainly place too much importance on. Passion ebbs and flows. To me, it’s about desire. If you have constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then you’ll be a great cook.” – Thomas Keller
“Cooking with kids is not just about ingredients, recipes, and cooking. It’s about harnessing imagination, empowerment, and creativity.” – Guy Fieri
“Once you understand the foundations of cooking – whatever kind you like, whether it’s French or Italian or Japanese – you really don’t need a cookbook anymore.” – Thomas Keller
“Food is a necessary component to life. People can live without Renoir, Mozart, Gaudi, Beckett, but they cannot live without food.”
– Grant Achatz
“Simple ingredients prepared in a simple way – that’s the best way to take your everyday cooking to a higher level.” – Jose Andres
“Fifty thousand dollars’ worth of cabinets isn’t going to make you a better cook; cooking is going to make you a better cook. At the end of the day, you can slice a mushroom in about three inches of space, and you can carve a chicken in a foot and a half. So it doesn’t matter how big the kitchen is.” – Tyler Florence
“Great cooking favors the prepared hands.”
– Jacques Pepin
“Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it’s too assertive to the naked eye.” – Gordon Ramsay
“’Chef’ doesn’t mean that you’re the best cook, it simply means ‘boss.’” – Tom Colicchio
Pin these inspirational cooking quotes for later!
More inspirational cooking quotes from some of the best chefs in the world
“You’ll have more confidence if you’ve made it five times, and that confidence adds so much fun to cooking.” – Tom Douglas
“The art of cooking is among the most intimate things that we can do for another.” – Charlie Trotter
“The greatest dishes are very simple. People who do not accept the new, grow old very quickly. Soup puts the heart at ease, calms down the violence of hunger, eliminates the tension of the day, and awakens and refines the appetite. Above all, keep it simple.”
– Auguste Escoffier, famous French chef and restaurateur
“I wasn’t passionate about food until I’d been cooking for a while. I started long before food became part of the mainstream media. I just wanted to cook, period.” – Bobby Flay
“Don’t be afraid to experiment and try new things in the kitchen. That’s how you discover your own unique style and create amazing dishes.” – Curtis Stone
“I’ve taught myself how to use good, fresh ingredients and to prepare them as simply as possible by cooking only to enhance their intrinsic flavors.” – Ina Garten
And a few more words of wisdom from chefs . . .
“Great cooking is about being inspired by the simple things around you – fresh markets, various spices. It doesn’t necessarily have to look fancy.” – G. Garvin.
“Cooking is about imbibing different cultures and putting them in a plate on the table.” – Johnny Iuzzini
“Taste as you go. When you taste the food throughout the cooking process, you can make adjustments as you go.” – Anne Burrell
“Part of what makes a great chef is the ability to adapt, cook, and to taste. A great chef will use all their food knowledge, food memories, and senses to work with each ingredient and apply themselves to the dish they are creating.” – Johnny Iuzzini
“If I could only have one type of food with me, I would bring soy sauce. The reason being that if I have soy sauce, I can flavor a lot of things.” – Martin Yan
“A good chef has to be a manager, a businessman and a great cook. To marry all three together is sometimes difficult.”
– Wolfgang Puck
“If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that’s exactly what I did.” – Gordon Ramsay
“I’m not making art, I’m making sushi.” – Masaharu Morimoto
Inspirational Cooking Quotes from the professional chef Julia Child
“People who love to eat are always the best people.” – Julia Child
“…no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.” – Julia Child
“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”
– Julia Child
“I think careful cooking is love, don’t you? The loveliest thing you can cook for someone who’s close to you is about as nice a valentine as you can give.” – Julia Child
“To be a good cook you have to have a love of the good, a love of hard work, and a love of creating.” – Julia Child
“You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces – just good food from fresh ingredients.” – Julia Child
“The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.” – Julia Child
Inspirational cooking quotes about Happiness
“Gastronomy is the art of using food to create happiness.” – Théodore Zeldin
“All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.” – John Gunther
“The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star. Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are. To invite people to dine with us is to make ourselves responsible for their well-being for as long as they are under our roofs.”
– Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (Another translation reads: “The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.”)
“When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy, that is what cooking is all about.” – Thomas Keller
Inspirational cooking quotes about Pleasure and Joy
“Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.” – Maya Angelou
“Cooking is at once child’s play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love.” – Craig Claiborne
“Great food and great company are the two life’s simplest yet great pleasures.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.” – M. F. K. Fisher
“There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.” – Thomas Wolfe
Musings about the creative process of cooking
“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”
– Laurie Colwin
“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation – experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.” – Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents
“Cooking is an observation-based process that you can’t do if you’re so completely focused on a recipe.” – Alton Brown
Inspirational Cooking Quotes from Writers
“We all eat, and it would be a sad waste of opportunity to eat badly.” – Anna Thomas
“One cannot think well, sleep well, live well if one has not dined well.” – Virginia Woolf
“Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.” – Anthony Bourdain
“Cooking demands attention, patience, and, above all, a respect for the gifts of the earth. It is a form of worship, a way of giving thanks.”
– Judith Jones
“Cooking for people is an enormously significant expression of generosity and soulfulness, and entertaining is a way to be both generous and creative. You’re sharing your life with people. Of course, it’s also an expression of your own need for approval and applause. Nothing wrong with that.” – Ted Allen
Additional quotes from writers
“Cooking is the best way to unwind at the end of a long writing day. There’s something mindless and hands-on about cooking, which makes it feel like the very opposite of writing, which is heady but inactive.” – Lauren Kate
“I think cooking is really key because it’s the only way you’re going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us. The fact is, so far, corporations don’t cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar – much more than you would ever use at home.” – Michael Pollan
“I feel a recipe is only a theme which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation.” – Madam Benoit
“In the childhood memories of every good cook, there’s a large kitchen, a warm stove, a simmering pot and a mom.”
– Barbara Costikyan
“I don’t like food that’s too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture, I’d buy a painting.” – Andy Rooney
“‘Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: Act 4, Scene 2
Comments on specific dishes
“Ice cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn’t illegal.” – Voltaire
“All worries are less with wine.”
– Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
“Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian, wine and tarragon make it French, sour cream makes it Russian, lemon and cinnamon make it Greek, soy sauce makes it Chinese, garlic makes it good.” – Alice May Brock
“The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken.” – Maya Angelou
Funny Cooking Quotes
“A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.” – Unknown
“I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.”
– Julia Child
“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” – Calvin Trillin
“Calvin: Why are you crying mom?
Mom: I’m cutting up an onion.
Calvin: It must be hard to cook if you anthropomorphize your vegetables.” – Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
“The only thing I like better than talking about food is eating.” – John Walters
“I am not a glutton – I am an explorer of food.” – Erma Bombeck
“I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.”
– W. C. Fields
“You don’t need a silver fork to eat good food.” – Paul Prudhomme
Inspirational cooking quotes from literature
“He’d noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination – but at the end of the day they’d settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.”
– Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
“Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food.” – John Green, Looking for Alaska
Even More Food Quotes
“Life is a combination of magic and pasta.” – Federico Fellini
“Happiness is a small house, with a big kitchen.”
– Alfred Hitchcock
“It is said, without the culinary arts the crudeness of reality would be unbearable.” – from the film Kate & Leopold
“They say the way to our hearts is through our stomachs, so the kitchen must be the heart of the home.” – Emma Reed
“If you are a chef, no matter how good a chef you are, it’s not good cooking for yourself; the joy is in cooking for others. It’s the same with music.”
– will.i.am
“Cooking, to me, it’s kind of therapeutic. It’s completely different from music as well. I’m not amazing at it, but I can cook myself a good meal.” – Phillip Phillips
“When baking, follow directions. When cooking, go by your own taste.”
– Laiko Bahrs
“Cooking is not difficult. Everyone has taste, even if they don’t realize it. Even if you’re not a great chef, there’s nothing to stop you understanding the difference between what tastes good and what doesn’t.” – Gerard Depardieu
If you made it this far, thank you for reading! {Free Gift}
If you still could use a little nudge, here’s my meal planning for beginners article. It features some helpful tips for easing into cooking without having to try the most complicated dish on your Pinterest board.
In addition, it also features a FREE weekly meal planner PDF that you can download and print out as often as you want!
If you found this article helpful, please consider joining my email newsletter community for new recipes delivered straight to your inbox!
You may also enjoy my article compiling quotes on self-control and discipline, as well as my fasting motivation quotes article.
Additional resources
I also find Bee Wilson’s books very inspirational – the link is directly to her website. Of course, you can also find her books on Amazon. Alternatively, you can look for them at your local library.
In addition, I have written about Bee Wilson’s books before in my Mediterranean soup article. I find her style of writing very no-nonsense, but somehow in a way that is quite encouraging and approachable. She makes me feel like I can easily cook a healthy dish if I just take the first step and then the one after that.
Ready to get cooking?
Here are some recipes to get you started:
- Green goddess soup (vegan, healthy, and delicious!)
- Gouda mac and cheese
- Broccoli frittata muffins (these egg cups freeze well for meal prepping, FYI)
- Churro pancakes
- Buffalo tofu wings
- Deviled potatoes (think deviled eggs, but vegan and dangerously good!)
- Vegan monkey bread (A cinnamon-packed Christmas classic!)
Thanks again for reading!
Now take Julia Child’s advice – get out there and try some new recipes! Finally, don’t forget to have fun!
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