“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death.” - Lin Yutang, Chinese writer, translator, and author of “The Importance of Living,” who was born 10 October 1895. Some quotes from the work of Lin Yutang: “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.” “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.” “There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.” “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ” “The wise man reads both books and life itself.” “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” “Those who are wise wont be busy, and those who are too busy cant be wise.” “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.” “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.” “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. ” “This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.” “The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened. ” “For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.” “Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.” “And if the reader has no taste for what he reads, all the time is wasted” “When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.” “When ones thoughts and experience have not reached a certain point for reading a masterpiece, the masterpiece will leave only a bad flavor on his palate.” “The passion fades, the remorse is eternal.” “Reading books in ones youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in ones courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace.” “Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.” “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 mens 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.” “Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.” “The moment a student gives up his right of personal judgment, he is in for accepting all the humbugs of life.” “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.” “There is no proper time and place for reading. When the mood for reading comes, one can read anywhere.”
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 12:53:18 +0000
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