Top 139 Quotes & Sayings by Lin Yutang - Page 3

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.

A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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