Lin Yutang Quotations

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 wise man reads both books and life itself.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Neckties strangle clear thinking.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 happiness is sensuous happiness.

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.

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.

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

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

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 so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.

Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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

Of the many rights of ladies, the best should be to be considered a mother.

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.

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

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

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

Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.

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.

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

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

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.