Top 120 Lin Yutang Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Alas, our rulers are not gods, but puny, fallible men, like the kings who constantly forget their parts, and we common men should be their prompters.”

— Lin Yutang

52. “The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world.”

— Lin Yutang

53. “Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.”

— Lin Yutang

54. “Happiness has always seemed like a bluebird, and consists of moments.”

— Lin Yutang

55. “If man be sensible and one fine morning, while he is lying in bed, counts at the tips of his fingers how many things in this life truly will give him enjoyment, invariably he will find food is the first one.”

— Lin Yutang

56. “Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.”

— Lin Yutang

57. “A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.”

— Lin Yutang

58. “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

59. “A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.”

— Lin Yutang

60. “There is nothing more beautiful in this world than a healthy, wise old man.”

— Lin Yutang

61. “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

62. “If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food.”

— Lin Yutang

63. “No child is born with a really cold heart, and it is only in proportion as we lose that youthful heart that we lose the inner warmth in ourselves.”

— Lin Yutang

64. “China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.”

— Lin Yutang

65. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

66. “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

67. “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

68. “We should not expect people to be good, but should make it impossible for them to be bad.”

— Lin Yutang

69. “The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.”

— Lin Yutang

70. “I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.”

— Lin Yutang

71. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

72. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

73. “Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.”

— Lin Yutang

74. “By association with nature’s enormities, a man’s heart may truly grow big also.”

— Lin Yutang

75. “I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing.”

— Lin Yutang

76. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

77. “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!”

— Lin Yutang

78. “The dog which remembers only to bark and not to bite, and is led through the streets as a lady’s pet, is only a degenerate wolf.”

— Lin Yutang

79. “A cocktail party is a place where you talk with a person you do not know about a subject you have no interest in.”

— Lin Yutang

80. “Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.”

— Lin Yutang

81. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

82. “Life is too short to make an over-serious business out of it.”

— Lin Yutang

83. “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

84. “It is not dirt but the fear of dirt which is the sign of man’s degeneration, and it is dangerous to judge a man’s physical and moral sanity by outside standards.”

— Lin Yutang

85. “There is a great probability that our loss of capacity for enjoying the positive joys of life is largely due to the decreased sensibility of our senses and our lack of full use of them. All human happiness is sensuous happiness.”

— Lin Yutang

86. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

87. “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

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

— Lin Yutang

89. “Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.”

— Lin Yutang

90. “An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.”

— Lin Yutang

91. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

92. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

93. “There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.”

— Lin Yutang

94. “No man is inherently respectable, but all women are by nature.”

— Lin Yutang

95. “Best behavior means the same thing as the most uncomfortable behavior.”

— Lin Yutang

96. “The fonder you are of your ideals, the greater your heartbreaks.”

— Lin Yutang

97. “He who is afraid to use an “I” in his writing will never make a good writer.”

— Lin Yutang

98. “The age calls for simple statements and restatements of simple truths. The prophets of doom are involved, those who would bring light must be clear.”

— Lin Yutang

99. “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.”

— Lin Yutang

100. “I regard the discovery of one’s favorite author as the most critical event in one’s intellectual development.”

— Lin Yutang