If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later.

This line appears in Lewis Carroll’s children’s fantasy novel *Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland* (1865), early in Alice’s first moments in the strange underground world. After finding a small bottle labeled “DRINK ME,” Alice hesitates, remembering that in stories people often come to harm by eating or drinking the wrong things. Carroll frames her caution with a wry, mock-logical observation about a bottle marked “poison,” blending childlike prudence with comic understatement. The remark helps establish Wonderland’s tone: a world where labels, rules, and consequences exist, but are filtered through playful narration and Alice’s earnest reasoning.

On its surface, the sentence is a commonsense warning: obvious dangers eventually have consequences. Carroll’s humor lies in the deadpan phrasing—“disagree with you” is a mild euphemism for serious harm—turning a moral lesson into a joke. More broadly, the line highlights a recurring theme in *Wonderland*: the tension between rational inference and an irrational environment. Alice tries to navigate by ordinary logic (labels should mean something; causes should have effects), yet the world continually bends those expectations. The quote thus functions both as practical caution and as a satirical nod to how we rely on signs and conventions to make sense of experience.