Yutang Lin Quotes & Sayings

Nobody is right and nobody is wrong. Only one thing is right, and that is the Truth, but nobody knows what it is. It is a thing that changes all the time, and then comes back to the same thing. -Old Yao — Lin Yutang

Scholars who are worth anything at all never know what is call "a hard grind" or what "bitter study" means. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

When one's thoughts and experience have not reached a certain point for reading a masterpiece, the masterpiece will leave only a bad flavor on his palate. — Lin Yutang

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

As Walt Whitman says, "I am sufficient as I am." It is sufficient that I live - and am probably going to live for another few decades - and that human life exists. Viewed that way, the problem becomes amazingly simple and admits of no two answers. What can be the end of human life except the enjoyment of it? — Lin Yutang

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

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

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. — Lin Yutang

With the predominance of economic problems and economic thinking, which is overshadowing all other forms of human thinking, we remain completely ignorant of, and indifferent to, a more humanized knowledge and a more humanized philosophy, a philosophy that deals with the problems of the individual life. — Lin Yutang

Best behavior means the same thing as the most uncomfortable behavior. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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

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

There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of life, "never lay straight" in bed, "like a corpse", but always curled up on one side. I believe one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one's legs in bed. The posture of the arms is also very important, in order to reach the greatest degree of aesthetic pleasure and mental power. I believe the best posture is not lying flat on the bed, but being upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one's head. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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

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

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! — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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

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

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. — Lin Yutang

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 — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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

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. — Lin Yutang

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. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death — Lin Yutang

The passion fades, the remorse is eternal. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature. — Lin Yutang

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

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

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

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. — Lin Yutang

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

The critical mind is too thin and cold, thinking itself will help little and reason will be of small avail; only the spirit of reasonableness, a sort of warm, glowing, emotional and intuitive thinking, joined with compassion, will insure us against a reversion to our ancestral type. Only the development of our life to bring it into harmony with our instincts can save us. I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the education of our ideas. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. — Lin Yutang

A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind. — Lin Yutang

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of the nonessentials. — Lin Yutang

Now it must be taken for granted that simplicity of life and thought is the highest and sanest ideal for civilization and culture, that when a civilization loses simplicity and the sophisticated do not return to unsophistication, civilization becomes increasingly full of troubles and degenerates. Man then becomes the slave of the ideas, thoughts, ambitions and social systems that are his own product. — Lin Yutang

The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy. — Lin Yutang

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! — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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

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. — Lin Yutang

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it, and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself. — Lin Yutang

my formula for the Chinese national mind is: R4D1H3S3 There — Lin Yutang

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

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

Every man must find his own philosophy, his attitude towards life. — Lin Yutang

I can see no other reason for the existence of art and poetry and religion except as they tend to restore in us a freshness of vision and more emotional glamour and more vital sense of life. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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

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

The best social philosophies do not claim any greater objective than that the individual human beings living under such a regime shall have happy individual lives. If there are social philosophies which deny the happiness of the individual life as the final goal and aim of civilization, those philosophies are the product of a sick and unbalanced mind. — Lin Yutang

A good traveler is one who who does not know where he is going to , and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from. — Lin Yutang

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

Anyone who wishes to learn to enjoy life must find friends of the same type of temperament, and take as much trouble to gain and keep their friendship as wives take to keep their husbands. — Lin Yutang

The moment a student gives up his right of personal judgment, he is in for accepting all the humbugs of life — Lin Yutang

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

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

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

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

Art is both creation and recreation. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought. — Lin Yutang

Who are we? That is the first question. It is a question almost impossible to answer. But we all agree that the busy self occupied in our daily activities is not quite the real self. We are quite sure we have lost something in the mere pursuit of living. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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

Creative work carries with it a form of intense love. — Lin Yutang

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

Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters, — Lin Yutang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Lin Yutang

Of all the rights of woman, the greatest is to be a mother — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

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. — Lin Yutang

So long as man is man, variety will still be the flavor of life. — Lin Yutang

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

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. — Lin Yutang