Lin Yutang Quotes

Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.

Enjoy every sandwich.

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.

There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.

Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.

It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

Awakening in the morning returns us to life, and to awareness of death.

The moment I stopped spending so much time chasing the big pleasure of life. I began to enjoy the little ones, like watching the stars dancing in moonlit sky or soaking in the sunbeams of a glorious summer morning.

Every morning, I shall concern myself anew about the boundary, Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No, And pressing forward honor reality. We cannot avoid, Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion, To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction, And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

I love Death because he breaks the human pattern and frees us from pleasures too prolonged as well as from the pains of this world. It is pleasant, too, to remember that Death lies in our hands; he must come if we call him. ... I think if there were no death, life would be more than flesh and blood could bear.

I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.

For here lies the pleasure of living: In taking God's bounties, and giving The gifts back again.

To eat figs off the tree in the very early morning, when they have been barely touched by the sun, is one of the exquisite pleasures of the Mediterranean.

Pleasures newly found are sweet When they lie about our feet.

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.

You hear stories about me beating my brains out practising, but the truth is, I was enjoying myself. I couldn't wait to get up in the morning, so I could hit balls. When I'm hitting the ball where I want, hard and crisply, it's a joy that very few people experience.

Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.

Of all life's pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.

I was just like a pathological liar when I was a kid. I think I just wanted to one-up somebody. Somebody would be like, 'Oh, God, my legs hurt.' I'd be like, 'Your legs hurt? I'm getting mine amputated next week.' And that's actually how my mother found out. She came to school and somebody was like, 'God, that's such a shame about Jennifer's legs.' She made me purge. I had to spill out all of my lies. I was like, 'I said that Dad drove a barge, and we were millionaires, and you were pregnant, I had to get my legs amputated, and I spayed cats and dogs on the weekends.' Now I can't lie.

Plays round the head, but comes not to the heart. One self-approving hour whole years outweighs Of stupid starers and of loud huzzas; And more true joy Marcellus exil'd feels Than Cæsar with a senate at his heels. In parts superior what advantage lies? Tell (for you can) what is it to be wise? 'T is but to know how little can be known; To see all others' faults, and feel our own.

Is it a good hot dog? That’s all I want to know … I don’t think the personal health and purity of my colon is that important compared to pleasure. As a chef, I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist. I’m in the pleasure business …. My responsibility is to give you the most delicious tomato that I can afford, given the circumstances, and maybe increase the likelihood that you get laid after dinner.