"Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading."
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Quote collection
Lin Yutang quotes (page 3 of 7)
138 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"Only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them."
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"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."
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"The wise man reads both books and life itself."
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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."
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"This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought."
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"Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves."
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"True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think it means a release of energy."
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"What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind."
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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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"Only friendship which can stand occasional plain speaking is worth having."
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"It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams."
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"The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness."
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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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"The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed."
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"However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight."
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"The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous."
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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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"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."
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