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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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Lin Yutang
Age: 80 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 10
Died: 1976
Died: March 26
Lexicographer
Linguist
Novelist
Philosopher
Translator
Writer
Conscious
Civilization
Return
Called
Living
Progressed
Made
Sophistication
Think
Simplicity
Thinking
Complete

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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.
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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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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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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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Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.
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We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.
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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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Neckties strangle clear thinking.
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Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
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What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man's liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted
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Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
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What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
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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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Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.
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All human happiness is sensuous happiness.
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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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By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
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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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Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.
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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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