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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.

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
Bored
Merely
Blessing
Difference
Differences
Probably
Monkeys
Imagination
Boredom
Men
Plus

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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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Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.
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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.
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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.
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Art is both creation and recreation.
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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.
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Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.
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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.
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The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
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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.
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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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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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A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.
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As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.
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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.
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An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
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Let us face ourselves bravely as we are. For only a philosophy that recognizes reality can lead us into true happiness, and only that kind of philosophy is sound and healthy.
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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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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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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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