Quote

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.

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
Work
Amount
Men
Alone
Upon
Idea
Bewildering
Living
Imposes
Nature
Imposed
Ideas
Civilization
Thing
Works

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
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Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man.
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The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.
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The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious ... it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.
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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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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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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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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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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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By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
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There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside he may only be disagreed with.
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The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
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No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.
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All human happiness is sensuous happiness.
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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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