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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.

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
Worship
Many
Asylum
Asylums
Unusual
Insane
Madness
China
West

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Today we are afraid of simple words like goodness and mercy and kindness. We don't believe in the good old words because we don't believe in good old values anymore. And that's why the world is sick.
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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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There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic 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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Sometimes there are more tears than laughter, and sometimes there is more laughter than tears, and sometimes you feel so choked you can neither weep nor laugh. For tears and laughter there will always be so long as there is human life. When our tear wells have run dry and the voice of laughter is silenced, the world will be truly dead.
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By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
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No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.
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An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
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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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The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.
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I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
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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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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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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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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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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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Neckties strangle clear thinking.
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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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The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
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Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.
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