Lin Yutang - My country and my people (1935)

8 Sourced Quotes

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I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death.

Lin Yutang
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.

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

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

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
To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.

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
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.

Lin Yutang