Lin Yutang Philosophy Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.