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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
Says
Literature
Polished
Lying
Basis
Society
Bases
Success
Thinks
Thinking
Exactly
Life
Exist
Amount

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
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All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
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There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
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I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.
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The wise man reads both books and life itself.
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No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
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I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
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The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living.
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It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action.
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The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.
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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.
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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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Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
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If man be sensible and one fine morning, while he is lying in bed, counts at the tips of his fingers how many things in this life truly will give him enjoyment, invariably he will find food is the first one.
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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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Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.
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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
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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.
Lin Yutang
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In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang