Quote

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

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
Way
Translate
Matters
Belief
Religion
Action
Matter
Much
Believe
Proceed

More quotes by 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
He who is afraid to use an I in his writing will never make a good writer.
Lin Yutang
Image
We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
Lin Yutang
Image
As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.
Lin Yutang
Image
Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
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
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
Lin Yutang
Image
An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside he may only be disagreed with.
Lin Yutang
Image
This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
Lin Yutang
Image
My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.
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
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