Lin Yutang Quotations

• Between Tears and Laughter
• On the Wisdom of America

From Between Tears and Laughter

Nothing impresses me more in American civilization than the fact that soap here is good and cheap and available to all. [Btl 62]

What do civilized men do, and what should civilized nations do? . . . The spirit of courtesy and accommodation is the very antithesis of the spirit of strife and contention. [Btl 84-85]

Common sense is so uncommon. [Btl 63]

Disagreement is not only profitable, but necessary to thinking. [Btl 1]

General education in good manners and music . . . is the basic teaching of Confucianism. It is the central, basic, and fundamental teaching of Confucian philosophy, which merges political and moral problems into one. [Btl 66]

The human mind is a curious thing. [Btl 5]

I have a hunch that if we leave the planning of world peace to women, we shall have it. [Btl 75-76]

The air must be chock full of . . . smell particles. [Btl 78]

"Now" has mathematically no meaning and no boundary. [Btl 12]

Evil breeds sorrow and good breeds happiness . . . We have to be satisfied with some such statement of the moral laws of the universe. [Btl 14]

It almost seems that the enjoyment of music provides the aim and end and raison d'etre of culture itself. [Btl 69]

[By] the lambs of Europe . . . I mean the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes, the Swiss . . . pioneers in social legislation and standards of enlightenment. [Btl 88-89]

The efforts of the common people . . . I respect. [Btl 94]

I am not anti-English; I am anti-idiots. [Btl 34]

How did the white man go about conquering the world . . . ? The white man had guns. [Btl 21]

Rituals and music [could] help to achieve [a] social harmony by establishing the right likes and dislikes. [Btl 71]

It is too late now to strangle Russia and China. [Btl 50]

To bring the people's inner feeling and external conduct into balance is the work of rituals and music. [Btl 72]

Economic thinking has superseded all other forms of thinking. [Btl 62, abr]

The age we are living in . . . there is little evidence of regeneration and a great deal of decay. [Btl 58]

Social "facts" . . . are a blending of judgments, prejudices, and piecemeal information. [Btl 97]

Not the objective facts of physical science . . . it is exactly on this type of facts that diplomatic thinking is based. [Btl 141]

Peace has already been achieved between Canada and the United States. [Btl 144]

We are talking more and more about the right to a job, right to an income . . . and are talking less and less about the right to be free . . . and the right of the individual. [Btl 164-65]

We are told to give up more and more freedom. [Btl 167]

The machine has been substituted for the man. [Btl 167]

The winter begins strictly on summer solstice. [Btl 191]

I say, "this" emanates from "that," and "that" also derives from "this." [Btl 192]

The voice of the heart is proof itself of "human dignity". [Btl 207]

I would not have life at any price. [Btl 209]

There is a common love for flavors in our mouths, a common sense for sounds in our ears, and a common sense for beauty in our eyes . . . What is that thing that we have in common in our hearts? [Btl 210]

Reason and the sense of right please our minds as beef and pork and mutton please our palates. [Btl 210]

Who has not a sense of shame is not a man . . . who is without a sense of right and wrong is not a man. [Btl 211]

From On the Wisdom of America

One mind seeks the learning of ancients and moderns; / Two legs straddle the cultures of East and West. - Lin Yutang

After ten years in the United States, Lin Yutang published On The Wisdom Of America (New York: The John Day Company) in 1950. In it, he cites many well-known Americans and elaborates on their output, reflecting Chinese values. The result can be rewarding. Among his many themes are "Psychoanalysis, Woman, When the Practical Man Becomes a Lover, Thoreau and Confucius, The Joys of Common Life, The Heroism of Common Toil, The Art of Doing Nothing, Society and Nature, Benjamin Franklin, Humor, Woodrow Wilson, and Einstein's credo."

The important thing is . . . to enjoy the voyage on which we are likely to be a long time. [Woa xiii]

There has been some pretty vigorous thinking and writing in the last hundred and seventy years of American national life. [Woa xiii]

To know one has good ancestors; it's a kind of subconscious feeling that makes for strength and pride. [Woa xiii]

Perhaps it would be simpler to describe a Western philosopher merely as a man who doubts he exists. [Woa 3]

Modern philosophy has the gift of missing the obvious. At the same time, its lack of adaptability is immense. [Woa 13]

Simplicity and sweet serenity have not been literary fashions during the last decades. [Woa 29 The urge of an Atlantic eel to go on a five-hundred-mile voyage to the fiords of Norway and lay his spawn, all enormously complicated processes . . . without even a word of reminder from the individual's mother on her deathbed. [Woa 50]

All birds are satisfied with their lives; only man is an exception. [Woa 50]

Is it too much to say that . . . fraud is not Freud? [Woa 51]

Myself and my ancestors . . . we are at least full of zest. [Woa 55]

Curiosity is a valuable trait. [Woa 56]

Unlike the great cats, simians tend to undervalue the body . . . The more civilized they grow the more they will let their bodies deteriorate . . . No other species will be quite so deformed and distorted. Athletics they will watch, yes, but on the whole sparingly practice . . . In spite of her wonders they will regard Nature as somehow too humble to be the true parent of such prominent people . . . Ailments of every kind will abound among such folk, inevitably, and they will resort to extraordinary expedients in their search for relief. [Woa 60]

The strong probability is that before men cease to hate and to become angry and to fence off their enemies, mankind will have perished. [Woa 63]

Four times as many women are thrown into lakes in America nowadays as were thrown into them during the era in which the Minnesota Maid lived. [Woa 66]

The only correct way to write about women is to regard them as men. [Woa 68]

It is after the serious work of love-making and establishing one's self in economic independence is over that one can rest and play. [Woa 75-76]

A young farmer was urged to set out some apple-trees. No, said he, they are too long growing, and I don't want to plant for other people. The young farmer's father was spoken to about it, but he, with better reason, alleged that apple-trees were slow and life was fleeting. At last some one mentioned it to the old grandfather of the young farmer. He had nothing else to do, so he stuck in some trees. He lived long enough to drink barrels of cider made from the apples that grew on those trees. . . . [Woa 83]

The literary essay, half narrative and half reflective, . . . has nearly died out in American literature now. [Woa 151]

Thoreau said that writing should be done by "the whole man," and he himself wrote with his brain and muscles. [Woa 220]

A privileged idle class also grows up, but in America it has brought into being a class of privileged, idle and unhappy women. [Woa 223]

It is the great psychologist C. G. Jung who advises these nervous city women, "Go to the country. Raise children, raise pigs and raise carrots." I doubt that the pleasure of a woman who sees her carrots grow is excelled by that of an artist in seeing his completed painting. [Woa 225]

The question indeed comes down to this: Is it possible to be at once sweet and sophisticated? . . . can one be at once honest and kindly, intelligent and courteous, informed and gay? [Woa 234]

"I've done nothing to-day." What! Have you not lived? That is . . . the most illustrious of your occupations. [Woa 241]

Dr Lin about Americans of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" . . . The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social . . . phenomena. [Woa 242]

The beauty of a conversation is that the other side always has a chance. [Woa 247]

Conversation at American dinner tables is more often impossible than possible . . . the long table usually kills it. [Woa 248]

A Puritan conscience . . . has prevented some great writer from writing a satisfactory description of a good dinner, heartily eaten by men with taste, with finesse, with love and respect and enthusiasm for the fuming wonders on the table. [Woa 255]

It seems simpler, and safer, to eat one guinea-fowl now on earth than wait for two in heaven tomorrow. [Woa 256]

(A doctor on the wrong track:)
  "This is the schedule I vouch for:
  After breakfast: 2 pipes
  At luncheon: 2 pipes
  Before dinner: 2 pipes
  Between dinner and bed: 10 to 12 pipes
  (Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.)" [Woa 264]

There is a plain and manly simplicity about [Nicholas] Vachel [Lindsay] that delights us all . . . here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty . . . Here is homo americanus . . . Afoot and penniless. [In the end he killed himself.] [Woa 268]

[The American poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) had studied medicine, but did not want to be a doctor. He was well known throughout the United States because his travels were sometimes recorded on the front page of every newspaper. In 1912 he published a little pamphlet, "Rhymes to be traded for bread." In it, he shows how to live the life of a vagabond. On a tramp-journey from Illious through the West and back, he observed:]
  (1) Keep away from the cities.
  (2) Keep away from the railroads.
  (3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage.
  (4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven.
  (5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter of five.
  (6) Travel alone.
  (7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square. (Etc). [Woa 269]

When it comes to perfect health and a simple, harmonious life, it is very much open to question whether human beings have any advantage over the animals. [Woa 275]

I should love to have a little box by the sea-shore . . . and see it stretch its shining lengths. [Woa 289]

I have never read a dissertation on humor, the psychology and anatomy of it, without getting furious . . . The great thing about laughter is laughter itself. [Woa 397]

Literature  

Woa: Yutang, Lin. On The Wisdom Of America. New York: The John Day Company, 1950.

Btl: Yutang, Lin. Between Tears and Laughter. New York: The John Day Company, 1943.



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