Lin Yutang Quotes

Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. … Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these.

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.

When people show you who they are, believe them, the first time. Not the 29th time!

For this too is a very pleasant strand woven into the Cynic's pattern of life; he must needs be flogged like an ass, and while he is being flogged he must love the men who flog him, as though he were the father or brother of them all.

The Rose that Grew from Concrete (2000)

This is approximately the way Christendom relates to the essentially Christian, the unconditioned. After seventeen, eighteen detours and running all around someone finally has his finite existence assured, and then we receive a sermon about Seek first the kingdom of God. Is this sobriety or is this intoxication? p. 112

I will probably die singing.

I’ve been through hell and back, and I’m grateful for every scar, I look at the woman I was in my 20s and I see a young lady growing into confidence but intent on pleasing everyone around her. I now feel so much more beautiful, so much sexier, so much more interesting. And so much more powerful.

I shall never be able to have any more of these boyish, zestful affairs — which are, really, when one thinks about it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly.

But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

The Rose Vol. 2 (2005)

From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preserves so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

I am completely indebted to Jimmy Baldwin's prose. It liberated me as a writer. These poems overwhelm without competing with his prose, and I am grateful to have this collection.

Unbelievable! To hear my father grouped together with Elvis Presley, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, it's a dream.

Li Yi-an was the greatest poetess of China. Once her husband asked one of his friends to pick out the best lines that he liked from a number of his poems, having, however, concealed in them some pieces by his wife. The friend picked out, to his dismay, only lines from her pen.