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When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty. When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace. When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice.
Lin Yutang
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All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists of bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony.
Lin Yutang
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A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.
Lin Yutang
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Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.
Lin Yutang
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While 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, as anybody who has a knowledge of Chinese literature will testify.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang
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Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.
Lin Yutang
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I wake up in the morning and seem to hear some one in the house sighing and saying that last night some one died. I immediately ask to find out who it is, and learn that it is the sharpest, most calculating fellow in town. Ah, is this not happiness?
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang
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The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious, is it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang
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And if the reader has no taste for what he reads, all the time is wasted
Lin Yutang
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If the early Chinese people had any chivalry, it was manifested not toward women and children, but toward old people. That feeling of chivalry found clear expression in Mencius in some such saying as, "The people with gray hair should not be seen carrying burdens on the street," which was expressed as the final goal of good government.
Lin Yutang
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All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
Lin Yutang
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Lin Yutang
Creative Commons
Born:
October 10, 1895
Died:
March 26, 1976
(aged 80)
Bio:
Lin Yutang was a Chinese writer, translator, linguist and inventor.
Known for:
The importance of living (1937)
Moment in Peking (1939)
My country and my people (1935)
The gay genius (1947)
Chinatown Family (1948)
Most used words:
life
chinese
human
man
happiness
scamp
wise
wisdom
loyalty
women
summer
feel
heart
people
death
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