Tea...is a religion of the art of life.
Okakura KakuzoRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Tea, like art, requires skill and mastery to reveal its best qualities.
Okakura Kakuzo compares the preparation of tea to the creation of art, asserting that both require a master to unlock their fullest potential. Just as paintings can vary in quality, so too can teas, indicating that the appreciation and execution of both necessitate expertise and discernment.
Themes
TeaArtMasteryQualitiesPainting
In practice
Example use cases
I often share the quote about tea being a work of art during my tea-tasting workshops.
More from Okakura Kakuzo
All quotes →Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.
Okakura KakuzoRead
Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order.
Okakura KakuzoRead
Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
Okakura KakuzoRead
For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought. Perhaps we reveal ourselves too much in small things because we have so little of the great to conceal. The tiny incidents of daily rouitine are as much a commentary of racial ideas as the highest flight of philosophy or poetry.
Okakura KakuzoRead
The ancient sages never put their teachings in a systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise.
Okakura KakuzoRead
Similar quotes
Men can absent themselves from real life for their art more easily. Women are anchored into the quotidian business of getting food on the table, making sure everybody's socks match, the soccer gear is ready. I admire idealists, but they're usually enabled by someone who holds the tether on their balloon, who pays the bills and sweeps up after them.
Geraldine BrooksRead
Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
George R. R. MartinRead
Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.
Octavio PazRead
If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.
Colson WhiteheadRead
I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
Charles DickensRead
Each bird must sing with his own throat.
Henrik IbsenRead