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.Collection: Dog
A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.Collection: Goal
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.Collection: Belief
In fact,I believe the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes in the mouth and wanting to eat it. The reason I don't trust Chinese surgeons is that I am afraid that when a Chinese surgeon cuts up my liver in search of a gall-stone, he may forget about the stone and put my liver in a frying pan.Collection: Believe
All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell.Collection: Mother
Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.Collection: Creative
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.Collection: Achievement
Love is an immortal wound that cannot be closed up. A person loses something, a part of her soul, when she loves someone. And she goes about looking for that lost part of her soul, for she knows that otherwise she is incomplete and cannot be at rest. It is only when she is with the person she loves that she becomes complete again in herself; but the moment he leaves, she loses that part which he has taken with him and knows no rest till she has found him once more.Collection: Love
All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists of bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony.Collection: Sex
All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.Collection: Country
Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.Collection: Life
There is nothing more beautiful in this world than a healthy, wise old man.Collection: Inspirational
I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.Collection: Appreciation
Let us face ourselves bravely as we are. For only a philosophy that recognizes reality can lead us into true happiness, and only that kind of philosophy is sound and healthy.Collection: Philosophy
There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.Collection: Tea
If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Insane
To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.Collection: Past
India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Men
Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.Collection: Inspirational
Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.Collection: Art
On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.Collection: Inspirational
When we demand liberty of a person as a constitutional right, we are taking away from the officials their liberty to chop off people's heads.Collection: People
Is it not tragic, for example, that while in the last World War almost everyone believed it was the war to end all wars and wanted to make it so, now in this Second World War almost no writer that I have read dares even suggest that this is the war to end all wars, or act on that belief? We have lost the courage to hope.Collection: War
Somewhere in [China's] soul lurks the cunning of an old dog, and it is a cunning that is strangely impressive. What a strange old soul! What a great old soul!Collection: Dog
If man be sensible and one fine morning, while he is lying in bed, counts at the tips of his fingers how many things in this life truly will give him enjoyment, invariably he will find food is the first one.Collection: Life
The human mind is a curious thing. It can take just so much and no more.Collection: Mind
The age calls for simple statements and restatements of simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who would bring light must be clear.Collection: Simple
China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.Collection: World
By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.Collection: Heart
Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand IndiaCollection: Mind
Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.Collection: Destiny
A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.Collection: Funeral
Winter in Peking is insurpassable, unless indeed it is surpassed by the other seasons in that blessed city. For Peking is a city clearly marked by the seasons, each perfect in its own way and each different from the others.Collection: Blessed
Of the many rights of ladies, the best should be to be considered a mother.Collection: Mother