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Art is both creation and recreation.

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
Recreation
Creation
Art

More quotes by 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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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
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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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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
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I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang
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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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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
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Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.
Lin Yutang
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Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.
Lin Yutang
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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
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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
Lin Yutang
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A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.
Lin Yutang
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As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.
Lin Yutang
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Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside he may only be disagreed with.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang
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In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.
Lin Yutang
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I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.
Lin Yutang
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There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
Lin Yutang
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Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.
Lin Yutang