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The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.

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
Longevity
Busy
Wise
Never
Men

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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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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The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.
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Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.
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Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.
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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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I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
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Art is both creation and recreation.
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Happiness has always seemed like a bluebird, and consists of moments.
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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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Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.
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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.
Lin Yutang
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Sometimes there are more tears than laughter, and sometimes there is more laughter than tears, and sometimes you feel so choked you can neither weep nor laugh. For tears and laughter there will always be so long as there is human life. When our tear wells have run dry and the voice of laughter is silenced, the world will be truly dead.
Lin Yutang
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All human happiness is sensuous happiness.
Lin Yutang
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What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man's liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted
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The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
Lin Yutang
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We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.
Lin Yutang
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An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
Lin Yutang
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There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.
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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.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang