Virginia Woolf wrote this in A Room of One's Own in 1929, a book adapted from two lectures she had given at Cambridge on women and fiction. The line appears during a passage about being served a bad lunch at a women's college, right after being served an excellent lunch at a men's. Woolf notices the difference, and then notices what the difference does to the rest of the day.

The sentence is usually pulled out as an endorsement of good food. That is not quite fair to it. Woolf is making an argument about the material conditions of thought. You cannot reason your way past a stomach that is empty, or a body that is exhausted, or a mind that has not had a surface to rest on. Culture likes to pretend intellectual life is above such matters. Woolf, who had survived enough breakdowns to know better, refused to pretend.

A cat draped across an armchair in deep, unselfconscious sleep after a full meal is the animal version of this argument, presented without footnotes. The cat is not lazy. It has completed the physical prerequisites for whatever it plans to do tomorrow. It has eaten. It has found a soft surface. It has surrendered. The thinking will be fine in the morning. The love will be fine. Woolf was only asking that we stop holding ourselves to a standard the cat has already proven is unreasonable.