Quote

The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.

Lin Yutang

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lin Yutang
Age: 80 †
Born: 1895
Born: October 10
Died: 1976
Died: March 26
Lexicographer
Linguist
Novelist
Philosopher
Translator
Writer
Fonder
Ideals
Greater
Heartbreaks

More quotes by Lin Yutang

Image
The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.
Lin Yutang
Image
Neckties strangle clear thinking.
Lin Yutang
Image
Winter in Peking is insurpassable, unless indeed it is surpassed by the other seasons in that blessed city. For Peking is a city clearly marked by the seasons, each perfect in its own way and each different from the others.
Lin Yutang
Image
There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
Lin Yutang
Image
If man be sensible and one fine morning, while he is lying in bed, counts at the tips of his fingers how many things in this life truly will give him enjoyment, invariably he will find food is the first one.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.
Lin Yutang
Image
This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
Lin Yutang
Image
China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
Lin Yutang
Image
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
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.
Lin Yutang
Image
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
Image
The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
Lin Yutang
Image
The wise man reads both books and life itself.
Lin Yutang
Image
I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.
Lin Yutang
Image
The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious ... it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.
Lin Yutang
Image
A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.
Lin Yutang