Top 100 Lin Yutang Quotes
#1. Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Lin Yutang
#2. Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.
Lin Yutang
#3. Somewhere in [China's] soul lurks the cunning of an old dog, and it is a cunning that is strangely impressive. What a strange old soul! What a great old soul!
Lin Yutang
#4. I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing.
Lin Yutang
#5. If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.
Lin Yutang
#6. There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
Lin Yutang
#7. The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.
Lin Yutang
#8. Of all the rights of woman, the greatest is to be a mother
Lin Yutang
#9. Reality - Dreams = Animal Being Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism Dreams + Humor = Fantasy Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
Lin Yutang
#10. There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.
Lin Yutang
#11. Best behavior means the same thing as the most uncomfortable behavior.
Lin Yutang
#12. Art is both creation and recreation.
Lin Yutang
#13. The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.
Lin Yutang
#14. I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.
Lin Yutang
#15. The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
Lin Yutang
#16. Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.
Lin Yutang
#17. A cocktail party is a place where you talk with a person you do not know about a subject you have no interest in.
Lin Yutang
#18. Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.
Lin Yutang
#19. The moment a student gives up his right of personal judgment, he is in for accepting all the humbugs of life
Lin Yutang
#20. There is so much to love and to admire in this life that it is an act of ingratitude not to be happy and content in this existence.
Lin Yutang
#21. Let him cry whoever feels like crying, for we were animals before we became reasoning beings, and the shedding of a tear, whether of forgiveness or of pity or of sheer delight at beauty, will do him a lot of good.
Lin Yutang
#22. If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live
Lin Yutang
#23. China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
Lin Yutang
#24. I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom.
Lin Yutang
#25. Happiness has always seemed like a bluebird, and consists of moments.
Lin Yutang
#26. In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.
Lin Yutang
#27. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.
Lin Yutang
#28. When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
Lin Yutang
#29. Today we are afraid of simple words like goodness and mercy and kindness. We don't believe in the good old words because we don't believe in good old values anymore. And that's why the world is sick.
Lin Yutang
#30. O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!
Lin Yutang
#31. What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
Lin Yutang
#32. All human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard.
Lin Yutang
#33. An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
Lin Yutang
#34. A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.
Lin Yutang
#35. All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
Lin Yutang
#36. Scholars who are worth anything at all never know what is call "a hard grind" or what "bitter study" means.
Lin Yutang
#37. Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
Lin Yutang
#38. The human mind is a curious thing. It can take just so much and no more.
Lin Yutang
#39. The passion fades, the remorse is eternal.
Lin Yutang
#40. The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
Lin Yutang
#41. Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.
Lin Yutang
#42. Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
Lin Yutang
#43. The age calls for simple statements and restatements of simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who would bring light must be clear.
Lin Yutang
#44. The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.
Lin Yutang
#45. Men resort to talking only when they haven't the power to enforce their convictions upon others.
Lin Yutang
#46. It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.
Lin Yutang
#48. A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.
Lin Yutang
#49. It is not dirt but the fear of dirt which is the sign of man's degeneration, and it is dangerous to judge a man's physical and moral sanity by outside standards.
Lin Yutang
#50. Alas, our rulers are not gods, but puny, fallible men, like the kings who constantly forget their parts, and we common men should be their prompters.
Lin Yutang
#51. What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man's liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted
Lin Yutang
#52. By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
Lin Yutang
#53. The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.
Lin Yutang
#54. However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight.
Lin Yutang
#55. Philosophy not only begins with the individual, but also ends with the individual. For an individual is the final fact of life. He is an end in himself, and not a means to other creations of the human mind. The
Lin Yutang
#56. Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.
Lin Yutang
#57. And if the reader has no taste for what he reads, all the time is wasted
Lin Yutang
#58. If man be sensible and one fine morning, while he is lying in bed,
counts at the tips of his fingers how many things in this life truly will
give him enjoyment, invariably he will find food is the first one.
Lin Yutang
#59. Since the invention of the flush toilet and the vacuum carpet cleaner, the modern man seems to judge a man's moral standards by his cleanliness, and thinks a dog the more highly civilized for having a weekly bath and a winter wrapper round his belly.
Lin Yutang
#60. Why should man bother himself so much about salvation, unless he has a feeling of being doomed?
Lin Yutang
#61. Winter in Peking is insurpassable, unless indeed it is surpassed by the other seasons in that blessed city. For Peking is a city clearly marked by the seasons, each perfect in its own way and each different from the others.
Lin Yutang
#62. Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.
Lin Yutang
#63. Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.
Lin Yutang
#64. The dog which remembers only to bark and not to bite, and is led through the streets as a lady's pet, is only a degenerate wolf.
Lin Yutang
#65. My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.
Lin Yutang
#66. A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.
Lin Yutang
#67. I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.
Lin Yutang
#68. We (the Chinese) eat food for its texture, the elastic or crisp effect it has on our teeth, as well as for fragrance, flavor and color.
Lin Yutang
#69. Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.
Lin Yutang
#70. I can see no other reason for the existence of art and poetry and religion except as they tend to restore in us a freshness of vision and more emotional glamour and more vital sense of life.
Lin Yutang
#71. Who are we? That is the first question. It is a question almost impossible to answer. But we all agree that the busy self occupied in our daily activities is not quite the real self. We are quite sure we have lost something in the mere pursuit of living.
Lin Yutang
#72. In the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them.
Lin Yutang
#73. Every man must find his own philosophy, his attitude towards life.
Lin Yutang
#74. A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.
Lin Yutang
#75. Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.
Lin Yutang
#76. Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace.
Lin Yutang
#77. Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.
Lin Yutang
#78. Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.
Lin Yutang
#79. Let us face ourselves bravely as we are. For only a philosophy that recognizes reality can lead us into true happiness, and only that kind of philosophy is sound and healthy.
Lin Yutang
#80. The humour of the Chinese people in inventing gunpowder and finding its best use in making firecrackers for their grandfathers' birthdays is merely symbolical of their inventiveness along merely pacific lines.
Lin Yutang
#81. Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.
Lin Yutang
#82. He who is afraid to use an "I" in his writing will never make a good writer.
Lin Yutang
#83. Nobody is right and nobody is wrong. Only one thing is right, and that is the Truth, but nobody knows what it is. It is a thing that changes all the time, and then comes back to the same thing. -Old Yao
Lin Yutang
#84. Now it is characteristic of play that one plays without reason and there must be no reason for it. Play is its own good reason.
Lin Yutang
#85. I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
Lin Yutang
#86. Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside; he may only be disagreed with.
Lin Yutang
#87. The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
Lin Yutang
#88. my formula for the Chinese national mind is: R4D1H3S3 There
Lin Yutang
#89. There is no proper time and place for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere
Lin Yutang
#90. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of the nonessentials.
Lin Yutang
#91. When one's thoughts and experience have not reached a certain point for reading a masterpiece, the masterpiece will leave only a bad flavor on his palate.
Lin Yutang
#92. The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious ... it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.
Lin Yutang
#93. Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India
Lin Yutang
#94. No child is born with a really cold heart, and it is only in proportion as we lose that youthful heart that we lose the inner warmth in ourselves.
Lin Yutang
#95. To me personally the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average businessman does, for no businessman who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher.
Lin Yutang
#96. The wise man reads both books and life itself.
Lin Yutang
#97. To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.
Lin Yutang
#98. There is nothing more beautiful in this world than a healthy, wise old man.
Lin Yutang
#99. Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
Lin Yutang
#100. Of the many rights of ladies, the best should be to be considered a mother.
Lin Yutang
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