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This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.

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
Function
Humor
Literature
Thought
Change
Character
Conceive
Chemical
Chemicals

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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Let him cry whoever feels like crying, for we were animals before we became reasoning beings, and the shedding of a tear, whether of forgiveness or of pity or of sheer delight at beauty, will do him a lot of good.
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The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.
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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 wise man reads both books and life itself.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
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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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Art is both creation and recreation.
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I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
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The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
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The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.
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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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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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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.
Lin Yutang