187 Quotes by Lin Yutang

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

India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.

All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell.

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

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.

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.

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.

A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.

Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.