Lin Yutang Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Even in despair, man must laugh.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Art is both creation and recreation.

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

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

Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.

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.

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

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

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

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

Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.

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

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.

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.

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

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

All human happiness is sensuous happiness.

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

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

The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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