A drinker has a hole under his nose that all his money runs into.

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), the English clergyman and moralist, is best known for compact, proverbial observations on character and conduct. This saying belongs to the long early-modern tradition of temperance literature that treated drunkenness not only as a spiritual failing but as a practical ruin of household economy. Fuller wrote during and after the upheavals of the English Civil Wars, when sermons, pamphlets, and collections of “wise sayings” commonly framed vice in terms of its social costs. The image of money “running” into a bodily “hole” is a typical Fuller-style conceit: vivid, homely, and designed to be remembered and repeated as a warning.

The line reduces habitual drinking to a simple mechanism of waste: the drinker’s mouth becomes a drain through which income disappears. By calling it a “hole,” Fuller implies not nourishment or pleasure but emptiness—an appetite that cannot be filled and therefore consumes resources without producing lasting benefit. The metaphor also shifts attention from occasional conviviality to the compulsive pattern of addiction and its economic consequences: wages, savings, and family provision are swallowed by drink. Its sting lies in the blunt physicality of the image, turning moral admonition into a concrete picture of leakage and loss.