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I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.

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
Attitude
Philosophy
Living
Best
Done
Needs
Appreciation

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
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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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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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All human happiness is sensuous happiness.
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Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.
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In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.
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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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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!
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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.
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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.
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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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Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.
Lin Yutang
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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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We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.
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The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
Lin Yutang
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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.
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.
Lin Yutang
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The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
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.
Lin Yutang
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There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
Lin Yutang