Lin Yutang

If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.

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.

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

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.

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

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.

Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do than what one can.

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

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.

A solemn funeral is inconceivable to the Chinese mind.