187 Quotes by Lin Yutang

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

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!

I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing.

Now it is characteristic of play that one plays without reason and there must be no reason for it. Play is its own good reason.

However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight.

After all the allowances are made for the necessity of having a few supermen in our midst - explorers, conquerors, great inventors, great presidents, heroes who change the course of history - the happiest man is still the man of the middle class who has earned a slight means of economic independence, who has done a little, but just a little, for mankind and who is slightly distinguished in his community, but not too distinguished.

True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think it means a release of energy.

Once Confucius was walking on the mountains and he came across a woman weeping by a grave. He asked the woman what here sorrow was, and she replied, We are a family of hunters. My father was eaten by a tiger. My husband was bitten by a tiger and died. And now my only son! Why don't you move down and live in the valley? Why do you continue to live up here? asked Confucius. And the woman replied, But sir, there are no tax collectors here! Confucius added to his disciples, You see, a bad government is more to be feared than tigers.

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.