Lin Yutang Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

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

Lin Yutang
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.

Lin Yutang
Now it is characteristic of play that one plays without reason and there must be no reason for it. Play is its own good reason.

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

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

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

Lin Yutang
The only part of Christian teachings which will be truly accepted by the Chinese people is Christ's injunction to be "harmless as doves" but "wise as serpents.

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
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.

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

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

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
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.

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

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

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

Lin Yutang
I am doing my best to glorify the scamp or vagabond. I hope I shall succeed. For things are not so simple as they sometimes seem. In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from being lost in serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him.

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
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.

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

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

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 traveller can] get the greatest joy of travel even without going to the mountains, by staying at home and watching and going about the field to watch a sailing cloud, or a dog, or a hedge, or a lonely tree.

Lin Yutang
A reasonable naturalist then settles down to this life with a sort of animal satisfaction. As Chinese illiterate women put it, "Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others. What else are we to do?".... Life becomes a biological procession and the very question of immortality is sidetracked. For that is the exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather holding his grandchild by the hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with the thought that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his ancestors. 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
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
When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.

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

Lin Yutang