Lin yutang quotes

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

I am willing to allow that smoking is a moral weakness, but on the other hand, we must beware of the man without weaknesses. He is not to be trusted. He is apt to be always sober and he cannot make a single mistake. His habits are likely to be regular, his existence more mechanical and his head always maintains its supremacy over his heart. Much as I like reasonable persons, I hate completely rational beings.

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

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

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

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

Art is both creation and recreation.

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

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.

Only friendship which can stand occasional plain speaking is worth having.

The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.

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.

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

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.

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.

India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.

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

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.

A cocktail party is a place where you talk with a person you do not know about a subject you have no interest in.

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

All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists of bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony.

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

We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.

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

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.

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

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

The only part of Christian teachings which will be truly accepted by the Chinese people is Christ's injunction to be "harmless as doves" but "wise as serpents.

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

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The history omankind seems like kite flying; sometimes, when the wind is favorable, we let go the string a little and the kite soars a little higher; sometimes the wind is too rough and we have to lower it a little, and sometimes it gets caught among the tree branches; but to reach the upper strata of pure bliss-ah, perhaps never.

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.

All human happiness is sensuous happiness.

We all have obligations and duties toward our fellow men. But it does seem curious enough that in modern neurotic society, men's energies are consumed in making a living and rarely in living itself. It takes a lot of courage for a man to declare, with clarity and simplicity, that the purpose of life is to enjoy it.

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.

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

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

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.

So much of unhappiness, it seems to me, is due to nerves; and bad nerves are the result of having nothing to do, or doing a thing badly, unsuccessfully or incompetently. Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do. True happiness comes to those who do their work well, followed by a refreshing period of rest. True happiness comes from the right amount of work for the day.

The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.

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.

Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer play of the human spirit is more important.

In fact,I believe the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes in the mouth and wanting to eat it. The reason I don't trust Chinese surgeons is that I am afraid that when a Chinese surgeon cuts up my liver in search of a gall-stone, he may forget about the stone and put my liver in a frying pan.

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

The question that faces every man born into this world is not what should be his purpose, which he should set about to achieve, but just what to do with life? The answer, that he should order his life so that he can find the greatest happiness in it, is more a practical question, similar to that of how a man should spend his weekend, then a metaphysical proposition as to what is the mystic purpose of his life in the scheme of the universe.

Even in despair, man must laugh.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes there are more tears than laughter, and sometimes there is more laughter than tears, and sometimes you feel so choked you can neither weep nor laugh. For tears and laughter there will always be so long as there is human life. When our tear wells have run dry and the voice of laughter is silenced, the world will be truly dead.

I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.

I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content.

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

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world.

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

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

Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside; he may only be disagreed with.

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

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

Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.

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.

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

If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.

On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.

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

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.

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

Love is an immortal wound that cannot be closed up. A person loses something, a part of her soul, when she loves someone. And she goes about looking for that lost part of her soul, for she knows that otherwise she is incomplete and cannot be at rest. It is only when she is with the person she loves that she becomes complete again in herself; but the moment he leaves, she loses that part which he has taken with him and knows no rest till she has found him once more.

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.

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

After all the allowances are made for the necessity of having a few supermen in our midst - explorers, conquerors, great inventors, great presidents, heroes who change the course of history - the happiest man is still the man of the middle class who has earned a slight means of economic independence, who has done a little, but just a little, for mankind and who is slightly distinguished in his community, but not too distinguished.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.

Once Confucius was walking on the mountains and he came across a woman weeping by a grave. He asked the woman what here sorrow was, and she replied, We are a family of hunters. My father was eaten by a tiger. My husband was bitten by a tiger and died. And now my only son! Why don't you move down and live in the valley? Why do you continue to live up here? asked Confucius. And the woman replied, But sir, there are no tax collectors here! Confucius added to his disciples, You see, a bad government is more to be feared than tigers.

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.

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.

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.

What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.

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!

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.

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.

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

Neckties strangle clear thinking.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

How many of us are able to distinguish between the odors of noon and midnight, or of winter and summer, or of a windy spell and a still one? If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of gray walls and cement pavements.

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.

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

Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.

Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.

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.

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

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.

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

To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.

There is no proper time and place for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere

He who is afraid to use an "I" in his writing will never make a good writer.

Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.

There is nothing more beautiful in this world than a healthy, wise old man.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious ... it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.

I am put on my best behavior, which means the same thing as the most uncomfortable behavior.

Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.

I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.

Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.