Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.

In these couplet lines, the speaker imagines an “epicure”—a person devoted to refined pleasure—who, having eaten well, feels insulated from misfortune. The humor lies in the disproportion between life’s vast uncertainties (“Fate”) and the small, immediate consolation of a good dinner. The sentiment satirizes a complacent philosophy that treats bodily comfort as a sufficient answer to existential threat, while also acknowledging a real psychological truth: ordinary satisfactions can temporarily restore a sense of security and control. Read this way, the couplet balances mockery and sympathy, capturing how easily contentment can masquerade as invulnerability.