Quote

To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.

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
Understanding
Future
Difficult
Survey
Easy
Surveys
Past
Glorify
Light
Emerge
Paint
Present

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Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside he may only be disagreed with.
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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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Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.
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There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.
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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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On the whole, the enjoyment of leisure is something which decidedly costs less than the enjoyment of luxury. All it requires is an artistic temperament which is bent on seeking a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner.
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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.
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Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
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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.
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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.
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As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.
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Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.
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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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By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.
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No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.
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