Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.

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

Even in despair, man must laugh.

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

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

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

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

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.

Only friendship which can stand occasional plain speaking is worth having.

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

Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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