Lin Yutang Quotes.
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
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.
There is so much to love and to admire in this life that it is an act of ingratitude not to be happy and content in this existence.
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.
Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.
Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.
Such is human psychology that if we don’t express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.
The wise man reads both books and life itself.
The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world.
Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
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.
Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
If one’s bowels move, one is happy, and if they don’t move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.
This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
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.
We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.
The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
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.
Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.
We all have obligations and duties toward our fellow men. But it does seem curious enough that in modern neurotic society, men’s energies are consumed in making a living and rarely in living itself. It takes a lot of courage for a man to declare, with clarity and simplicity, that the purpose of life is to enjoy it.
