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

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
Greater
Heartbreaks
Fonder
Ideals

More quotes by Lin Yutang

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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.
Lin Yutang
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Let him cry whoever feels like crying, for we were animals before we became reasoning beings, and the shedding of a tear, whether of forgiveness or of pity or of sheer delight at beauty, will do him a lot of good.
Lin Yutang
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By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
Lin Yutang
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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
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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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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.
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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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.
Lin Yutang
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Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.
Lin Yutang
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The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.
Lin Yutang
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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
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Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Lin Yutang
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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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The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
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.
Lin Yutang
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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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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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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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The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
Lin Yutang
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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.
Lin Yutang