Lin Yutang Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Neckties strangle clear thinking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

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

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.

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

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.

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.