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There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.

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
Teutonic
Heather
Heathers
Tons
Rose
Philosophy
Hope

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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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.
Lin Yutang
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I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
Lin Yutang
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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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Neckties strangle clear thinking.
Lin Yutang
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This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
Lin Yutang
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An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
Lin Yutang
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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!
Lin Yutang
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The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.
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.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang
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No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Lin Yutang
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The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang
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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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Now it is characteristic of play that one plays without reason and there must be no reason for it. Play is its own good reason.
Lin Yutang
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In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.
Lin Yutang
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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
Lin Yutang
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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
Lin Yutang