Lin Yutang

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

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.

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

Since the invention of the flush toilet and the vacuum carpet cleaner the modern man seems to judge a mans 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.

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

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

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

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

The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.

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.

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

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.

The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.

Of all the rights of women the greatest is to be a mother.

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

The more we justify our beliefs the more narrow minded we become.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

It is not dirt but the fear of dirt which is the sign of mans degeneration and it is dangerous to judge a mans physical and moral sanity by outside standards.

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

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

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.

By association with natures enormities a mans heart may truly grow big also.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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