Top 120 Lin Yutang Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”

— Lin Yutang

Featured in: Journey Quotes, Beautiful Quotes, Travel Quotes, Adventure Quotes

2. “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

3. “When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.”

— Lin Yutang

4. “The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”

— Lin Yutang

5. “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.”

— Lin Yutang

6. “Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”

— Lin Yutang

7. “The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.”

— Lin Yutang

8. “Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.”

— Lin Yutang

9. “True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think it means a release of energy.”

— Lin Yutang

10. “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

11. “Art is both creation and recreation. Of the two ideas, I think art as recreation or as sheer play of the human spirit is more important.”

— Lin Yutang

12. “I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living one needs.”

— Lin Yutang

13. “There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.”

— Lin Yutang

14. “Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.”

— Lin Yutang

15. “Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.”

— Lin Yutang

16. “Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother.”

— Lin Yutang

17. “Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.”

— Lin Yutang

18. “A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.”

— Lin Yutang

19. “The wise man reads both books and life itself.”

— Lin Yutang

20. “Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.”

— Lin Yutang

21. “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?”

— Lin Yutang

22. “It is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make life endurable.”

— Lin Yutang

23. “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

24. “Even in despair, man must laugh.”

— Lin Yutang

25. “It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.”

— Lin Yutang

26. “This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.”

— Lin Yutang

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Art is both creation and recreation.”

— Lin Yutang

30. “In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness.”

— Lin Yutang

31. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

32. “All human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard.”

— Lin Yutang

33. “The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.”

— Lin Yutang

34. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

35. “All human happiness is sensuous happiness.”

— Lin Yutang

36. “There is no proper time and place for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere.”

— Lin Yutang

37. “Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.”

— Lin Yutang

38. “Such is human psychology that if we don’t express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.”

— Lin Yutang

39. “Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India.”

— Lin Yutang

40. “Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.”

— Lin Yutang

41. “All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell.”

— Lin Yutang

42. “I have a hankering to go back to the Orient and discard my necktie. Neckties strangle clear thinking.”

— Lin Yutang

43. “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

44. “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

45. “There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.”

— Lin Yutang

46. “There is so much to love and to admire in this life that it is an act of ingratitude not to be happy and content in this existence.”

— Lin Yutang

47. “A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.”

— Lin Yutang

48. “When we demand liberty of a person as a constitutional right, we are taking away from the officials their liberty to chop off people’s heads.”

— Lin Yutang

49. “The human mind is a curious thing. It can take just so much and no more.”

— Lin Yutang

50. “Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.”

— Lin Yutang