Tea quotes

A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

~Eleanor Roosevelt

tea leaves
tea loves
loves tea
lives tea
leaves tea?
never.

~Uniek Swain

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

~Alice Walker

I like tea and yoga, but I don't do yoga.

~Moby

If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.

~Abraham Lincoln

The tea baggers. The one thing they hate is when you call them racist. The other thing they hate is black people. But they won't say it.

~Bill Maher

When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.

~Audrey Hepburn

In the country I always fear that creation will expire before tea-time.

~Sydney Smith

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

~Henry David Thoreau

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.

~Henry Fielding

Tea should be taken in solitude...

~C.S. Lewis

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

~C. S. Lewis

If you ask Zen people they will say tea is not something that you pour with unawareness and drink like any other drink. It is not a drink, it is meditation; it is prayer. So they listen to the kettle creating a melody, and in that listening they become more silent, more alert.

~Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

~Elie Wiesel

Each cup of tea represents an imaginary voyage.

~Catherine Douzel

A Proper Tea is much nicer than a Very Nearly Tea, which is one you forget about afterwards.

~A. Milne

Japanese

Architecture is basically a container of something.
I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.

~Yoshio Taniguchi

Sen no Rikyū

If you have one teapot And can brew your tea in it
That will do quite well.
How much does he lack himself
Who must have a lot of things?

Tea is nothing but
Boiling water
And making tea.
This is the only rule
You should know.

Though I sweep and sweep
Everywhere my garden path,
Through invisible
On the slim pine needles still
Specks of dirt may be found.

If you have one pot
And can make your tea in it
That will do quite well.
How much does he lack himself
Who must have a lot of things?

When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into the stone bowl
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away
.

Though many people drink tea,
if you do not know the Way of Tea,
tea will drink you up.
Without any spiritual training,
you think you are drinking tea,
but actually tea drinks you up.

The Way of Tea is naught but this:
first you boil water, then you make the tea and drink it.
However, this can only be appreciated after strict training in the Way.

Sen Soshitsu XV

A cup of tea is a cup of peace. A pure wind envelopes my body. The whole world seen in a single cup.

Nambo Sokei

The truth lies in a bowl of tea.

Yoshio Taniguchi

Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.

Okakura Kakuzō

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.

The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.

Tea with us became more than an idealization of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life.... Teaism was Taoism in disguise.

In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely.... Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius...

Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.... It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

Sen Joo

I take pleasure in tea, appreciating it with my spirit and therefore cannot explain why.

Chinese

Lu Yu

Its liquor is like the sweetest dew from heaven.

The effect of tea is cooling and as a beverage it is most suitable. 

It is especially fitting for persons of self-restraint and inner worth.

Its goodness is a decision for the mouth to make.

Tea tempers the spirit and harmonizes the mind; dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness.

The clouds above us join and separate, The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns. Life is like that, so why not relax? Who can stop us from celebrating?

The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly.