Quote

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.

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
Thinking
Dog
Highly
Vacuums
Standards
Civilized
Bath
Judging
Round
Vacuum
Wrapper
Modern
Rounds
Toilet
Flush
Since
Invention
Baths
Weekly
Moral
Judge
Toilets
Cleaner
Seems
Winter
Carpet
Cleaners
Men
Thinks
Belly
Cleanliness

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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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We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.
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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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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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The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living.
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In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.
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Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside he may only be disagreed with.
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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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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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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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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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The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
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The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.
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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 age calls for simple statements and restatements of simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who would bring light must be clear.
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The greater success a man has made, the more he fears a climb down.
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An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
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Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.
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China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
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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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