Part of our love affair with coffee seems to be tied up in the ritual and history of drinking it ... For centuries, gatherings over a cup of coffee have generated a collective mystique that every generation wants to join in on, wants its piece of, wishes to call its own.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

The morning cup of coffee has an exhiliration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European “coffee,” one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you're not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You're drinking your projects, you're drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

Roasted coffee contains over eight hundred separate flavour and aroma components, most of which form in the crucible of the roaster. This strange alchemy accounts in part for the hold that coffee exerts over our imagination.

Coffee has assumed a social meaning that goes far beyond the simple black brew in the cup. The worldwide coffee culture is more than a culture -- it is a cult. There are usenet newsgroups on the subject, along with innumerable sites on the World Wide Web, and Starbucks outlets populate every street corner, vying for space with other coffeehouses and chains. And after all is said and done, it's just the pit of a berry from an Ethiopian shrub.

Coffee in England is just toasted milk.

Coffee offers connoisseurship at a good price, without pretension.

Coffee is the world's most valuable trading commodity after oil.

Coffee is the common man's gold, and like gold,

it brings to every man the feeling of luxury and nobility.

Where coffee is served, there is

grace and splendor and friendship and happiness.

All cares vanish as the coffee cup is raised to the lips.