Quotes from Lin Yutang

An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.

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

Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.

Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

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

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.

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

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world.

Alas, our rulers are not gods, but puny, fallible men, like the kings who constantly forget their parts, and we common men should be their prompters.

It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.

Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.

Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.

No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.

All women's dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.

The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living.

O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!

Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.

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

Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer play of the human spirit is more important.

If ones bowels move, one is happy; and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.

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

I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.

Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.