Quote

A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.

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
Tendencies
Straight
Instead
Goal
Often
Circling
Around
Carries
Carrie
Tendency

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This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
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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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An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
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The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
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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.
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The wise man reads both books and life itself.
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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
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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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The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.
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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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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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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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Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.
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Art is both creation and recreation.
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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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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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No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.
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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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Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
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