Yutang Quotes

#1. It is while prone that ideas come. "A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his novels in this posture than he could by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and afternoon," writes Lin Yutang in his essay "On Lying in Bed.

Tom Hodgkinson

#2. 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

#3. Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.

Lin Yutang

#4. The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.

Lin Yutang

#5. 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

#6. The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.

Lin Yutang

#7. For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.

Lin Yutang

#8. By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.

Lin Yutang

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.

Lin Yutang

#12. 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

#13. A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.

Lin Yutang

#14. Make No Distinctions

Lin Yutang

#15. It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.

Lin Yutang

#16. Men resort to talking only when they haven't the power to enforce their convictions upon others.

Lin Yutang

#17. The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.

Lin Yutang

#18. 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

#19. Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.

Lin Yutang

#20. Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.

Lin Yutang

#21. The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.

Lin Yutang

#22. The passion fades, the remorse is eternal.

Lin Yutang

#23. The human mind is a curious thing. It can take just so much and no more.

Lin Yutang

#24. 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

#25. Scholars who are worth anything at all never know what is call "a hard grind" or what "bitter study" means.

Lin Yutang

#26. 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

#27. Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.

Lin Yutang

#28. Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.

Lin Yutang

#29. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell.

Lin Yutang

#30. There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.

Lin Yutang

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. There is a great probability that our loss of capacity for enjoying the positive joys of life is largely due to the decreased sensibility of our senses and our lack of full use of them. All human happiness is sensuous happiness.

Lin Yutang

#34. When we demand liberty of a person as a constitutional right, we are taking away from the officials their liberty to chop off people's heads.

Lin Yutang

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think it means a release of energy.

Lin Yutang

#39. It is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make life endurable.

Lin Yutang

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters,

Lin Yutang

#44. The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living.

Lin Yutang

#45. Why should man bother himself so much about salvation, unless he has a feeling of being doomed?

Lin Yutang

#46. Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.

Lin Yutang

#47. Anyone who wishes to learn to enjoy life must find friends of the same type of temperament, and take as much trouble to gain and keep their friendship as wives take to keep their husbands.

Lin Yutang

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. And if the reader has no taste for what he reads, all the time is wasted

Lin Yutang

#51. Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.

Lin Yutang

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. The moment a student gives up his right of personal judgment, he is in for accepting all the humbugs of life

Lin Yutang

#55. Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.

Lin Yutang

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.

Lin Yutang

#59. I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.

Lin Yutang

#60. 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

#61. Art is both creation and recreation.

Lin Yutang

#62. Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.

Lin Yutang

#63. Best behavior means the same thing as the most uncomfortable behavior.

Lin Yutang

#64. 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

#65. It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action.

Lin Yutang

#66. Of all the rights of woman, the greatest is to be a mother

Lin Yutang

#67. 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

#68. Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.

Lin Yutang

#69. There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.

Lin Yutang

#70. This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.

Lin Yutang

#71. 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

#72. The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.

Lin Yutang

#73. I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing.

Lin Yutang

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.

Lin Yutang

#78. If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food.

Lin Yutang

#79. 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

#80. Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man.

Lin Yutang

#81. After all, only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them. Seriousness, after all, is only a sign of effort, and effort is a sign of imperfect mastery,

Lin Yutang

#82. Much as I like reasonable persons, I hate completely rational beings. For that reason, I am always scared and ill at ease when I enter a house in which there are no ash trays.

Lin Yutang

#83. What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

Lin Yutang

#84. A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.

Lin Yutang

#85. No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.

Lin Yutang

#86. A good traveler is one who who does not know where he is going to , and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.

Lin Yutang

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.

Lin Yutang

#90. 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

#91. In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.

Lin Yutang

#92. Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom So

Lin Yutang

#93. Happiness has always seemed like a bluebird, and consists of moments.

Lin Yutang

#94. 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

#95. Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother

Lin Yutang

#96. China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.

Lin Yutang

#97. So long as man is man, variety will still be the flavor of life.

Lin Yutang

#98. If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live

Lin Yutang

#99. There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it, and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

Lin Yutang

#100. 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