Frases de Lin Yutang

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“Si no puedes vivir una vida bella, debes soñarla.”

“La vida está compuesta de insignificancias; el año de instantes y las montañas de granos de arena. Por lo tanto no subestimes nada, por pequeño que te parezca.”

“Los que son sabios, poco hablan; y los que hablan mucho, son poco sabios.”

“Hay tanto para amar y admirar en esta vida, que es un acto de ingratitud no estar feliz y contento con esta existencia.”

“Vive como si no fueras a morir nunca, actúa como si fueras a morir mañana.”

“La sabiduría de la vida consiste en la eliminación de lo no esencial. En reducir los problemas de la filosofía a unos pocos solamente: el goce del hogar, de la vida, de la naturaleza, de la cultura.”

“En esta vida hay lágrimas, y lo que importa, después de todo, es ante lo que lloramos.”

“Perdonamos a los grandes del mundo porque han muerto; pero en vida son imperdonables.”

“Por estar en conformidad con el Tao, es eterno, y toda su vida está protegida de daño.”

“La belleza de la vida humana consiste en que, al revisar nuestras resoluciones el día de fin de año, descubrimos que hemos cumplido una tercera parte, hemos dejado sin cumplir otro tanto, y no podemos recordar a qué se refería la otra tercera parte.”

“El hombre superior ama su alma; el hombre inferior ama su propiedad.”

“Los libros no deben clasificarse nunca. Clasificarlos es una ciencia, pero no clasificarlos es un arte.”

“Es muy simple; cuando uno quiere a una persona puede llamarla por cualquier nombre, que siempre tiene un sentido cariñoso.”

“Un placer como el de una conversación perfecta es necesariamente raro, porque los sabios rara vez saben hablar y los que hablan rara vez que son sabios.”

“Un hombre educado es el que tiene los amores y los odios juntos.”

“El máximo de poder es la iniciación de la decadencia.”

“Our task is not so much discovery as re-discovery. What one needs is not so much thinking as remembering. Sometimes it suffices to sit quietly and listen well, when venerable men have thought before us. Constant forgettings of truths once perceived are the very charm of the human mind; the history of human thought is nothing more than the story of these forgettings and rememberings and forgettings again.”

“Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.”

“A man may own a thousand acres of land, and yet he still sleeps upon a bed of five feet.”

“The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.”

“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.”

“I like to think of criticism as the highest intellectual effort that mankind is capable of, and above all, I like to think of self-criticism as the most difficult attainment of an educated man.”

“It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action.”

“The Chinese believe that when there are too many policemen, there can be no individual liberty, when there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice, and when there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace.”

“What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini… in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.”

“If life is all subjective, why not be subjectively happy rather than subjectively sad?”

“To the West, it seems hardly imaginable that the relationship between man and man (which is morality) could be maintained without reference to a Supreme Being, while to the Chinese it is equally amazing that men should not, or could not, behave toward one another as decent beings without thinking of their indirect relationship through a third party.”

“If the early Chinese people had any chivalry, it was manifested not toward women and children, but toward old people. That feeling of chivalry found clear expression in Mencius in some such saying as, "The people with gray hair should not be seen carrying burdens on the street," which was expressed as the final goal of good government.”

“Human life can be lived like a poem.”

“A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.”

“While in the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them, as anybody who has a knowledge of Chinese literature will testify.”

“I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom.”

“A mellow understanding of life and of human nature is, and always has been, the Chinese ideal of character, and from that understanding other qualities are derived, such as pacifism, contentment, calm and strength of endurance which distinguish the Chinese character.”

“He who perceives death perceives a sense of the human comedy, and quickly becomes a poet.”

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

“These influences of my young childhood were greatest: 1, the mountain landscape, 2, my father the impossible idealist, and 3, the upringing of a closely-knit Christian home.”

“I am here to speak on freedom of speech. It is a great topic, and I am going to make my speech as free as possible. But you know that this cannot be done, for when anyone announces that he is going to speak his mind freely, everyone is frightened. This shows that there is no such thing as true freedom of speech. No one can afford to let his neighbors know what he is thinking about them. Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.”

“A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.”

“The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him.”

“Such religion as there can be in modern life, every individual will have to salvage from the churches for himself.”

“I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher, feeling first life's tragedy and then life's comedy. For we must weep before we can laugh. Out of sadness comes the awakening, and out of the awakening comes the laughter of the philosopher, with kindliness and tolerance to boot.”

“How many of us are able to distinguish between the odors of noon and midnight, or of winter and summer, or of a windy spell and a still one? If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of gray walls and cement pavements.”

“If compelled to indicate my religion on an immigration blank, I might be tempted to put down the word "Taoist," to the amazement of the customs officer who probably never heard of it.”

“To me personally, the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average businessman does, for no businessman who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher.”

“The greatest ideal that man can aspire to is not to be a show-case of virtue, but just to be a genial, likable and reasonable human being.”