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The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.

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
Happiness
Soul
Inward
Test
Salvation
Tests

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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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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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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Neckties strangle clear thinking.
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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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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
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He who is afraid to use an I in his writing will never make a good writer.
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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.
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To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.
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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.
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All human happiness is sensuous happiness.
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Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
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The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
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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.
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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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I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
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By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
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It is not dirt but the fear of dirt which is the sign of man's degeneration, and it is dangerous to judge a man's physical and moral sanity by outside standards.
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I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.
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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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However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight.
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