Lin Yutang - The importance of living (1937)

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Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.

Lin Yutang
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
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.

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

Lin Yutang
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
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
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