Tea

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Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, "The tea party" (before 1909)
Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. ~ Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. ~ Kakuzō Okakura

Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by adding cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant to hot water. The term also refers to the plant itself. After water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world. It has a cooling, slightly bitter, astringent flavour which many people enjoy.

Quotes[edit]

Picture you upon my knee,
Just tea for two and two for tea,
Just me for you and you for me, alone! ~ Irving Caesar
Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. ~ Henry Fielding
In English society while there is tea there is hope. ~ Arthur Wing Pinero
Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea. ~ Sydney Smith
  • I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.
  • Matrons, who toss the cup, and see
    The grounds of fate in grounds of tea.
  • Tea! thou soft, thou sober, sage, and venerable liquid, * * * thou female tongue-running, smile-smoothing, heart-opening, wink-tippling cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moment of my life, let me fall prostrate.
  • I view tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an en-genderer of effeminancy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age. Thus he makes that miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it if he had made his wife brew beer instead of making tea.
  • Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
    Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
    And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
    Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
    That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
    So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
  • Who, sitting down to tea after hours spent in country sunshine, can fail to tell himself that he is living in a far more fortunate period than either the age of Pericles or the Middle Ages? Who would willingly turn the hands of the clock back to a time before tea had been brought into Europe? Sentimentalists who put Merrie England in the Middle Ages surely forgot that Merrie England was a tea-less England and by so much the less merry than England to-day.
  • One day I decided to try to have a complete day without tea. I was quite shaken. I was quite disturbed.
    • Morrissey, interviewed for Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea (2013), BBC Television
  • Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities.
  • Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.
    • George Orwell, Smothered under journalism: 1946. Works of George Orwell, Volumen 18, George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison. Secker & Warburg, 1998, ISBN 0436203774.
  • In English society while there is tea there is hope.
    • Arthur Wing Pinero, Sweet Lavender (1888), Act II. London: William Heinemann, 1893, p. 73.
  • Soft yielding Minds to Water glide away,
    And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea.
  • Here, thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
    Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.
  • Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before 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; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 778.

External links[edit]

Tea at Wikiquote's sister projects:
Article at Wikipedia
Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
Media from Commons
News stories from Wikinews
Source texts from Wikisource
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Database entry #Q6097 on Wikidata
Travel guide from Wikivoyage
Species directories Camellia sinensis from Wikispecies