As a tea drinker, you’re in pretty fine company: Every time you steep a cup, you enter into a great tradition that started thousands of years ago in China and has carried through to the present.
Your specific tea ritual may involve sitting down with a hot cup of tea and a good book. Did you ever consider the possibility that some of your favorite authors might enjoy doing the same thing?
Many well known writers, artists, and influential figures were/are tea drinkers – let’s see what ten of them famously had to say about the beverage you are (hopefully) enjoying right now.
1. “You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis, novelist, poet, academic
2. “When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?” – Muriel Barbery, French novelist and professor of philosophy
3. “Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves — slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this moment is life.” -Thich Nhat Hahn, Zen Buddhist Monk
4. “Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, lecturer, and poet
5. “Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.” – Alice Walker, American author and activist
6. “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” – Henry James, American writer
7. “Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.” – Henry Fielding, English novelist and dramatist
8. “I shouldn’t think even millionaires could eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea.” – Dodie Smith, English novelist and playwright
9. “There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.” – Gary Snyder, American Poet
10. “Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.” – Chaim Potok, American Jewish author and rabbi
Potok provides us with the perfect segue – tea is a happy topic for those of us here at The Republic of Tea, and we can never get enough, whether the tea talk comes from famous authors or our very own community of tea drinkers (that means you!). So what’s your tea quote? Share a well-worded quote with us on Facebook and you may be featured in an upcoming post.
