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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Is it not tragic, for example, that while in the last World War almost everyone believed it was the war to end all wars and wanted to make it so, now in this Second World War almost no writer that I have read dares even suggest that this is the war to end all wars, or act on that belief? We have lost the courage to hope.

Even in despair, man must laugh.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Art is both creation and recreation.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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 age calls for simple statements and restatements of simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who would bring light must be clear.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.

The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.