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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.

Lin Yutang

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Lin Yutang
Age: 80 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 10
Died: 1976
Died: March 26
Lexicographer
Linguist
Novelist
Philosopher
Translator
Writer
Life
Exist
Amount
Says
Literature
Polished
Lying
Basis
Society
Bases
Success
Thinks
Thinking
Exactly

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The wise man reads both books and life itself.
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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 age calls for simple statements and restatements of simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who would bring light must be clear.
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Neckties strangle clear thinking.
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Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside he may only be disagreed with.
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He who is afraid to use an I in his writing will never make a good writer.
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The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
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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.
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In the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them.
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What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
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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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The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
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I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.
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Winter in Peking is insurpassable, unless indeed it is surpassed by the other seasons in that blessed city. For Peking is a city clearly marked by the seasons, each perfect in its own way and each different from the others.
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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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Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man.
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The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.
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All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell.
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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
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As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.
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