Lin Yutang

Reality - Dreams = Animal Being Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism Dreams + Humor = Fantasy Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom

True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think it means a release of energy.

All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.

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

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

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

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

Now it is characteristic of play that one plays without reason and there must be no reason for it. Play is its own good reason.

All human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India

It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.

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.

Such is human psychology that if we don't express our joy, we soon cease to feel it.

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.

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