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The Importance of Living QUOTES

The Importance of Living QUOTES

1 " 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 , The Importance of Living

2 " Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

3 " The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

4 " 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 , The Importance of Living

5 " A good traveler is one who who does not know where he is going to , and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

6 " Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

7 " In contrast to logic, there is common sense, or still better, the Spirit of Reasonableness. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

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

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

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

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

10 " There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of life, "never lay straight" in bed, "like a corpse", but always curled up on one side. I believe one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one's legs in bed. The posture of the arms is also very important, in order to reach the greatest degree of aesthetic pleasure and mental power. I believe the best posture is not lying flat on the bed, but being upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one's head. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

11 " The outstanding characteristic of Western scholarship is its specialization and cutting up of knowledge into different departments. The over-development of logical thinking and specialization, with its technical phraseology, has brought about the curious fact of modern civilization, that philosophy has been so far relegated to the background, far behind politics and economics, that the average man can pass it by without a twinge of conscience. The feeling of the average man, even of the educated person, is that philosophy is a "subject" which he can best afford to go without. This is certainly a strange anomaly of modern culture, for philosophy, which should lie closest to men's bosom and business, has become most remote from life. It was not so in the classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans, and it was not so in China, where the study of wisdom of life formed the scholars' chief occupation. Either the modern man is not interested in the problems of living, which are the proper subject of philosophy, or we have gone a long way from the original conception of philosophy. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

12 " Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

13 " 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 , The Importance of Living

14 " I regard the discovery of one’s favorite author as the most critical event in one’s intellectual development. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

15 " Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

16 " There is no proper time and place for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

17 " And if the reader has no taste for what he reads, all the time is wasted "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

18 " The moment a student gives up his right of personal judgment, he is in for accepting all the humbugs of life "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

19 " When one's thoughts and experience have not reached a certain point for reading a masterpiece, the masterpiece will leave only a bad flavor on his palate. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living

20 " In fact,I believe the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes in the mouth and wanting to eat it. The reason I don't trust Chinese surgeons is that I am afraid that when a Chinese surgeon cuts up my liver in search of a gall-stone, he may forget about the stone and put my liver in a frying pan. "

― Lin Yutang , The Importance of Living