Quote

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?

Lin Yutang

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lin Yutang
Age: 80 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 10
Died: 1976
Died: March 26
Lexicographer
Linguist
Novelist
Philosopher
Translator
Writer
Children
Love
Patriotism
Food
Child

More quotes by Lin Yutang

Image
Art is both creation and recreation.
Lin Yutang
Image
A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.
Lin Yutang
Image
The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
Lin Yutang
Image
He who is afraid to use an I in his writing will never make a good writer.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
O wise humanity, terribly wise humanity! How inscrutable is the civilization where men toil and work and worry their hair gray to get a living and forget to play!
Lin Yutang
Image
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
Image
The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.
Lin Yutang
Image
Reality - Dreams = Animal Being Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism Dreams + Humor = Fantasy Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
Lin Yutang
Image
There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
Lin Yutang
Image
Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside he may only be disagreed with.
Lin Yutang
Image
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
Image
Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
Lin Yutang