Quotes from Lin Yutang

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.

He who is afraid to use an "I" in his writing will never make a good writer.

Happiness has always seemed like a bluebird, and consists of moments.

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 is nothing more beautiful in this world than a healthy, wise old man.

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.

It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action.

If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food.

Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do than what one can.

We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.

Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.

Society can only exist on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.

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.

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.

Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.

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.

It is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make life endurable.

The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.

There is no proper time and place for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere

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

And if the reader has no taste for what he reads, all the time is wasted

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.