Lin Yutang Quotes - Page 4

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

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.

Since the invention of the flush toilet and the vacuum carpet cleaner, the modern man seems to judge a man's moral standards by his cleanliness, and thinks a dog the more highly civilized for having a weekly bath and a winter wrapper round his belly.

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.

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.

The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.

Why should man bother himself so much about salvation, unless he has a feeling of being doomed?

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.

Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.

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.

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.

The question that faces every man born into this world is not what should be his purpose, which he should set about to achieve, but just what to do with life? The answer, that he should order his life so that he can find the greatest happiness in it, is more a practical question, similar to that of how a man should spend his weekend, then a metaphysical proposition as to what is the mystic purpose of his life in the scheme of the universe.

There is no proper time and place for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere

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

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

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

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.

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.

The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.

Men resort to talking only when they haven't the power to enforce their convictions upon others.

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

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.

And if the reader has no taste for what he reads, all the time is wasted

Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer play of the human spirit is more important.

As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.