Lin Yutang - The importance of living (1937)

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

Lin Yutang
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.

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

Lin Yutang
Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.

Lin Yutang
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.

Lin Yutang
Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.

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

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

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

Lin Yutang
Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.

Lin Yutang
To open the window and let a wasp out of the room. Ah, is this not happiness?

Lin Yutang
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.

Lin Yutang
It has been raining for a whole month and I lie in bed in the morning like one drunk or ill, refusing to get up. Suddenly I hear a chorus of birds announcing a clear day. Quickly I pull aside the curtain, push open the window and see the beautiful sun shining and glistening and the forest looks like having a bath. Ah, is this not happiness?

Lin Yutang
By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.

Lin Yutang
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.

Lin Yutang
One can learn such a lot and enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three generations is a long, long time to see human follies and acquire human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, "It was a good show," when the curtain falls.

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

Lin Yutang
To have just finished repaying all one's debts. Ah, is this not happiness?

Lin Yutang
It is not when he is working in his office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, "Life is beautiful."

Lin Yutang
There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.

Lin Yutang
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.

Lin Yutang
I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom.

Lin Yutang
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