Lin Yutang Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Even in despair, man must laugh.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.

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

Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.

Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.

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