Chinese writer (1895-1976)
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
LIN YUTANG
The Literary Digest, 1938
China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
LIN YUTANG
preface, My Country and My People
The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside; he may only be disagreed with.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter
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.
LIN YUTANG
My Country and My People
The human mind is a curious thing. It can take just so much and no more.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter
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!
LIN YUTANG
My Country and My People
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.
LIN YUTANG
Moment in Peking
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.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
The dog which remembers only to bark and not to bite, and is led through the streets as a lady's pet, is only a degenerate wolf.
LIN YUTANG
My Country and My People
The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living
Sometimes there are more tears than laughter, and sometimes there is more laughter than tears, and sometimes you feel so choked you can neither weep nor laugh. For tears and laughter there will always be so long as there is human life. When our tear wells have run dry and the voice of laughter is silenced, the world will be truly dead.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter
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.
LIN YUTANG
preface, Between Tears and Laughter
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.
LIN YUTANG
Moment in Peking
The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter
Even in despair, man must laugh.
LIN YUTANG
Between Tears and Laughter