Quote

As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.

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
Done
Feel
Feels
Mussolini
Macaroni
Italy
Appreciation
International
Understanding

More quotes by Lin Yutang

Image
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
Image
If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.
Lin Yutang
Image
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
Lin Yutang
Image
My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.
Lin Yutang
Image
An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
Lin Yutang
Image
I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.
Lin Yutang
Image
By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
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
All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
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
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
Image
Reality - Dreams = Animal Being Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism Dreams + Humor = Fantasy Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
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.
Lin Yutang
Image
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
Image
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
Image
He who is afraid to use an I in his writing will never make a good writer.
Lin Yutang
Image
The wise man reads both books and life itself.
Lin Yutang
Image
The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.
Lin Yutang
Image
What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
Lin Yutang