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Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Lin Yutang
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Lin Yutang
Age: 80 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 10
Died: 1976
Died: March 26
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Wisdom
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Minimalism
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Elimination
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Yoga
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Besides
More quotes by Lin Yutang
China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
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On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.
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Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
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If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.
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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.
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Let us face ourselves bravely as we are. For only a philosophy that recognizes reality can lead us into true happiness, and only that kind of philosophy is sound and healthy.
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I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
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Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.
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Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
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To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.
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Since the invention of the flush toilet and the vacuum carpet cleaner, the modern man seems to judge a man's moral standards by his cleanliness, and thinks a dog the more highly civilized for having a weekly bath and a winter wrapper round his belly.
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It is not dirt but the fear of dirt which is the sign of man's degeneration, and it is dangerous to judge a man's physical and moral sanity by outside standards.
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I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.
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In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.
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Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.
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A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.
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Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.
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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.
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The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
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