Lin Yutang

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have
learned how to live.
– Lin Yutang

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone.
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
– 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

Today we are afraid of simple words like goodness and mercy and kindness. We don’t believe
in the good old words because we don’t believe in good old values anymore. And that’s why
the world is sick.
– Lin Yutang

Evil breeds sorrow and good breeds happiness. We have to be satisfied with some such
statement of the moral laws of the universe.
– Lin Yutang

The wise man reads both books and life itself.
– 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 world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious, it has need of a wise and
merry philosophy.
– Lin Yutang

It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and
proceed to translate that belief into action.
– Lin Yutang

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
– Lin Yutang

Disagreement is not only profitable, but necessary to thinking.
– Lin Yutang

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

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

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it,
the road comes into existence.
– Lin Yutang

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

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

Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found
something they want to do.
– Lin Yutang

Tolerance has been, I think, the greatest quality of Chinese culture.
– Lin Yutang

Who has not a sense of shame is not a man; who is without a sense of right and wrong is
not a man.
– Lin Yutang

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

A man without passion or sentiment is a worm, a machine, an automaton, a blot upon this
earth.
– Lin Yutang

I have a hunch that if we leave the planning of world peace to women, we shall have it.
– Lin Yutang

Strength of character is really strength of mind, according to the Confucianists.
– Lin Yutang

Those people who agree with me in believing in lying in bed as one of the greatest pleasures
of life are the honest men.
– Lin Yutang

Merry Old China quietly sips her tea and smiles on. A great old soul!
– Lin Yutang

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

You can’t make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner.
– Lin Yutang

The strong probability is that before men cease to hate and to become angry and to fence
off their enemies, mankind will have perished.
– Lin Yutang

Reality – Dreams = Animal Being
Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism)
Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism)
Dreams – Humor = Fanaticism
Dreams + Humor = Fantasy
Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
– Lin Yutang

I am here to speak on freedom of speech. It is a great topic, and I am going to make my
speech as free as possible. But you know that this cannot be done, for when anyone
announces that he is going to speak his mind freely, everyone is frightened. This shows that
there is no such thing as true freedom of speech. No one can afford to let his neighbors know
what he is thinking about them. Society can exist only on the basis that there is some
amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
– 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

A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.
– Lin Yutang

I am not anti-English; I am anti-idiots.
– Lin Yutang

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

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

Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to
realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.
– Lin Yutang

It seems to me simplicity is about the most difficult thing to achieve in scholarship and
writing.
– Lin Yutang

I have always assumed that the end of living is the true enjoyment of it.
– Lin Yutang

A perfect traveler does not know where he came from. He does not even know his own name
and surname.
– Lin Yutang

The moment a student gives up his right of personal judgment, he is in for accepting all the
humbugs of life.
– Lin Yutang

Civilization is largely a matter of seeking food, while progress is that development which
makes food more and more difficult to get. This doesn’t seem to make very much sense.
– Lin Yutang

I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.
– Lin Yutang

Deprived of academic training in philosophy, I am less scared to write a book about it.
Everything seems clearer and simpler for it.
– Lin Yutang

Why has the educational system twisted and distorted the pleasant pursuit of knowledge into
a mechanical, measured, uniform and passive cramming of information?
– Lin Yutang

The Westerners go to see a doctor only when they are sick, and do not see him when they
are well.
– Lin Yutang

Westerners shake each other’s hands, while we shake our own.
– Lin Yutang

Travel seems to have become a lost art.
– Lin Yutang

When a friend of Confucius told him that he always thought three times before he acted,
Confucius wittily replied, “To think twice is quite enough.”
– Lin Yutang

China gave the world some of its most important inventions. And she has a wisdom of life
entirely her own.
– 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

The ideal educated man is not necessarily one who is well-read or learned, but one who likes
and dislikes the right things.
– Lin Yutang

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

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old,
familiar pillow.
– Lin Yutang

Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is
what we imagine to be in God’s mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess
at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God
the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.
– Lin Yutang

I always depend on the judgement of a woman rather than that of a man.
– Lin Yutang

Once Confucius was walking on the mountains and he came across a woman weeping by a
grave. He asked the woman what here sorrow was, and she replied, “We are a family of
hunters. My father was eaten by a tiger. My husband was bitten by a tiger and died. And
now my only son!” “Why don’t you move down and live in the valley? Why do you continue to
live up here?” asked Confucius. And the woman replied, “But sir, there are no tax collectors
here!” Confucius added to his disciples, “You see, a bad government is more to be feared
than tigers.”
– 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

Chinese logic is highly personal, like women’s logic.
– 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

Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.
– Lin Yutang

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

The love of mankind which requires reasons is no true love.
– Lin Yutang

I prefer talking with a colored maid to talking with a mathematician. I generally gain more in
knowledge of human nature by talking with her.
– Lin Yutang

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

Much as I like reasonable persons, I hate completely rational beings. For that reason, I am
always scared and ill at ease when I enter a house in which there are no ash trays.
– Lin Yutang

Common sense is so uncommon.
– Lin Yutang

My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth.
Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient,
disciplined and regimented soldier.
– 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

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

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

Thoreau is the most Chinese of all American authors.
– Lin Yutang

All women’s dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire
to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
– Lin Yutang

I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
– Lin Yutang

Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer
play of the human spirit is more important.
– Lin Yutang

Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.
– Lin Yutang

Communists and Fascists make a false start at the very beginning by ignoring the role of the
individual, both as the creating personality and the object of the creation.
– Lin Yutang

Nine tenths of the world’s most important discoveries, both scientific and philosophical, are
come upon when the scientist or philosopher is curled up in bed at two or five o’clock in the
morning.
– Lin Yutang

I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the
wisdom of foolishness.
– Lin Yutang

Women as a whole, as seen in the parks and in the streets, have better figures and are better
dressed, thanks to the continuous tremendous daily efforts of women to keep their figure to
the great delight of men. But I imagine how it must wear on their nerves.
– Lin Yutang

The highest conception of human dignity, according to the Chinese Confucianists, is when
man reaches ultimately his greatest height, an equal of heaven and earth, by living in
accordance with nature.
– Lin Yutang

If men fail to enjoy this earthly existence we have, it is because they do not love life
sufficiently and allow it to be turned into a humdrum routine existence.
– Lin Yutang

The final test of any civilization is, what type of husbands and wives and fathers and mothers
does it turn out?
– Lin Yutang

The end of all knowledge is to serve human 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

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

A man with a warm, generous and sentimental nature may be easily taken in by his cleverer
fellowman.
– 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

Where are the smiles of the European dictators?
– Lin Yutang

When one cannot be powerful, one must choose to be dainty, and when one cannot be
aggressive, one has to make a virtue of reasonableness.
– Lin Yutang