Top 15 Lin Yutang Quotes

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.

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

There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.

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

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

Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.

When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was.

The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

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

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.

There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.

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.