"Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks."
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Quote collection
Lin Yutang quotes (page 5 of 7)
138 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Art is both creation and recreation."
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"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."
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"Why should man bother himself so much about salvation, unless he has a feeling of being doomed?"
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"No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature."
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"I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom."
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"Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India"
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"If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food."
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"The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living."
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"The question that faces every man born into this world is not what should be his purpose, which he should set about to achieve, but just what to do with life? The answer, that he should order his life so that he can find the greatest happiness in it, is more a practical question, similar to that of how a man should spend his weekend, then a metaphysical proposition as to what is the mystic purpose of his life in the scheme of the universe."
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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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"Men resort to talking only when they haven't the power to enforce their convictions upon others."
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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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"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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"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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"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."
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"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."
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"The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become."
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"It is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make life endurable."
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"How many of us are able to distinguish between the odors of noon and midnight, or of winter and summer, or of a windy spell and a still one? If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of gray walls and cement pavements."
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