Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
Lin Yutangwas a Chinese writer, translator, linguist and inventor. His informal but polished style in both Chinese and English made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, and his compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English were bestsellers in the West...
NationalityChinese
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth10 October 1895
CountryChina
inspirational life learning
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
acceptance experience important
Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.
character pity-love feelings
The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.
business mean men
When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
mothers-day mom parenting
Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother
medicine chinese distinction
The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
summer country wall
How many of us are able to distinguish between the odors of noon and midnight, or of winter and summer, or of a windy spell and a still one? If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of gray walls and cement pavements.
belief justify narrow-minded
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
personality sense-of-humor affair
I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom.
philosophy society body
Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.
army thinking color
Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.
reading men world
The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world.
philosophy rose heathers
There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
funeral chinese mind
A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.