Kakuzo OkakuraThinkers

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage.

Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. We have good and bad teas, as we have good and bad paintings - generally the latter.

Tea is an excuse for the worship of purity and refinement, a sacred function at which the host and guest joined to produce for that occasion the utmost beatitude of the mundane.

Tea is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly.

Tea is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness.

Tea is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.

Tea is more than an idealization of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life.

Tea is not mere aestheticism, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature.

Tea is to dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.