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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
Heathers
Tons
Rose
Philosophy
Hope
Teutonic
Heather

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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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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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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This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
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Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.
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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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The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
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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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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
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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 Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
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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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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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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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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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In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.
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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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A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.
Lin Yutang
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What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
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.
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The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
Lin Yutang