Literature
The world's favourite beverage has inspired some of our most famous philosophers, writers and poets. Sit back with a cup of your favourite brew and enjoy our favourite tea quotes...
"Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea."
~ Henry Fielding, 'Love in Several Masques'
"Tea is drunk to forget the din of the World."
~ Tien Yiheng
"There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Letters and Social Aims'
"Strange how a teapot can represent at the same time the comforts of solitude and the pleasures of company."
~ Author unknown
"Each cup of tea represents an imaginary voyage."
~ Catherine Douzel
"I always fear that creation will expire before teatime."
~ Sydney Smith
"Drinking a daily cup of tea will surely starve the apothecary."
~ Chinese Proverb
"There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea."
~ Bernard-Paul Heroux
"Bread and water can so easily be toast and tea."
~ Author unknown
"If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are too heated, it will cool you. If you are depressed, it will cheer you. If you are excited, it will calm you."
~ William Gladstone
"We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing it made it worse.
We haven't had any tea for a week...
The bottom is out of the universe."
~ Rudyard Kipling
"There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."
~ Henry James, 'Portrait of a Lady'
"Another novelty is the tea party, an extraordinary meal in that, being offered to persons who have already dined well, it supposes neither appetite nor thirst, and has no object but distraction, no basis but delicate enjoyment."
~ Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin 'The Physiology of Taste'
"The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose."
~ George Gissing, 'The Private Papers of Henry Reycroft'
"Tea should be taken in solitude."
~ C.S. Lewis
"If man has no tea in him, he is uncapable of understanding truth and beauty."
~ Japanese Proverb
"Tea is liquid wisdom."
~ Author unknown
"Find yourself a cup of tea; the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things."
~ Saki
"Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors."
~ Alice Walker
"Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane."
~ Honore de Balzac
"Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the Earth revolves- slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future."
~ Thich Nat Hahn
"Tea's proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence."
~ Samuel Johnson
"O peppermint tea -
Two delights per sip
As steamy hot as passion
Cool as a wintry lake dip."
~ Astrid Alauda
"Iced tea may not have as much wisdom as hot tea, but in the summer better a cool and refreshed dullard than a steamy sweat-drenched sage - leave sagacity to the autumn!"
~ Linda Solegato
"Iced tea is too pure and natural a creation not to have been invented as soon as tea, ice and hot weather crossed paths."
~ John Egerton
"Tea... is a religion of the art of life."
~ Okakura
"All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes."
~ George Orwell, 'A Nice Cup of Tea'
"Tea does our fancy aid,
Repress those vapours which the head invade
And keeps that palace of the soul serene."
~ Edmund Waller, 'Of Tea'
"A Proper Tea is much nicer than a Very Nearly Tea, which is one you forget about afterwards."
~ A.A. Milne
"tea leaves
tea loves
loves tea
lives tea
leaves tea?
never."
~ Uniek Swain
"Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there still honey for tea?"
~ Rupert Brooke, 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester'
"The perfect temperature for tea is two degress hotter than just right."
~ Terri Guillemets
"Remember the tea kettle - it is always up to its neck in hot water, yet it still sings!"
~ Author unknown
"Tea! Thou soft, thou sober, sage, and venerable liquid... thou female tongue-running, smile-soothing, heart-opening, wind-tippling coridal, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moment of my life; let me fall prostrate."
~ Colley Cibber, 'Lady's Last Stake'
"Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn't try it on."
~ Billy Connolly
"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
~ C.S. Lewis