Lin Yutang Quotes

Chinese have always been a proud people,

Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.

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

The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.

Como la tormenta no podía soplar en todas partes a la vez, siempre había algún rincón donde quedaban unas hojas, un rincón donde brillaba el sol y donde temporalmente había un refugio de paz. La historia de la Guerra de China, como la historia de todos los grandes movimientos, está escrita en las mentes y los corazones de su generación. Dentro de cincuenta o cien años, en las charlas caseras y los relatos de las viejas, se contarán las historias de miles de esas hojas barridas por la tormenta. Cada hoja en la tormenta es un individuo con un corazón y sentimientos y aspiraciones y deseos.

No, the enjoyment of an idle life doesn't cost any money. The capacity for true enjoyment of idleness is lost in the moneyed class and can be found only among people who have a supreme contempt for wealth. It must come from an inner richness of the soul in a man who loves the simple ways of life and who is somewhat impatient with the business of making money.

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.

Nations have their dreams and the memories of such dreams persist through generations and centuries. Some of these are noble dreams, and others wicked and ignoble. The dreams of conquest and of being bigger and stronger than all the others are always bad dreams, and such nations always have more to worry about than others who have more peaceful dreams. But there are other and better dreams, dreams of a better world, dreams of peace and of nations living at peace with one another, and dreams of less cruelty, injustice, and poverty and suffering.

The Genesis story of the reason why Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden was not that they had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, as is popularly conceived, but the fear lest they should disobey a second time and eat of the Tree of Life and live forever: And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one. of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

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.

I can see no other reason for the existence of art and poetry and religion except as they tend to restore in us a freshness of vision and more emotional glamour and more vital sense of life.

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

There was a man who was in Hell and about to be re-incarnated, and he said to the King of Re-incarnation, “If you want me to return to the earth as a human being, I will go only on my own conditions.” “And what are they?” asked the King. The man replied, “I must be born the son of a cabinet minister and father of a future ‘Literary Wrangler’ (the scholar who comes out first at the national examinations). I must have ten thousand acres of land surrounding my home and fish ponds and fruits of every kind and a beautiful wife and pretty concubines, all good and loving to me, and rooms stocked to the ceiling with gold and pearls and cellars stocked full of grain and trunks chockful of money, and I myself must be a Grand Councilor or a Duke of the First Rank and enjoy honor and prosperity and live until I am a hundred years old,” And the King of Re-incarnation replied, “If there was such a lot on earth, I would go and be re-incarnated myself, and not give it to you!

Of all the rights of woman, the greatest is to be a mother

Totisesti on olemassa hetkiä, jolloin elämä on meille liian suurta, jolloin kaikki tyynni on liitossa meitä vastaan pettääkseen ja tuhotakseen toiveemme; silloin ihminen on kuin kulkija, joka on metsässä kadottanut suuntamerkit tai joutunut maanalaiseen luolaan, missä törmää kivimuuriin, kääntyipä minne hyvänsä.