One of the most influential writers of his time, translator, linguist, journalist, inventor, and nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature; Lin Yutang worked hard to bridge the divides between East and West. He invented and built a Chinese typewriter, romanized the Chinese language, helped publish a Chinese-English dictionary, and brought Chinese culture and wisdom into the Western world’s awareness. Many of his classic Chinese translations became bestsellers helping to popularize Chinese philosophy. A prolific writer, he published magazines, wrote innumerable essays, and his books include more than 14 in Chinese and more than 30 in English. Born into a Christian minister’s family, he later studied and followed Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism but returned to a Christian path in his 60’s.
On the Wisdom of America (1950)
On the Wisdom of America, 1950
The Gay Genius (1947)
Wisdom of Confucius (1938)
“All women’s dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unedited desire to undress.”
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“The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”
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“This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.”
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“Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.”
Chapters:
53. Shameless Thieves
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“People who don’t read become imprisoned in their immediate world and their lives fall into a limited and set routine. A good book though, puts us in communion with different ages, different cultures, dead spirits from long ago that discuss aspects of life we know nothing about.”
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“When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.”
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“If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live”
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“Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.”
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“There is so much to love and admire in this life—it’s an act of ingratitude not to be happy and content”
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“Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.”
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“Anyone who wishes to learn to enjoy life must find friends of the same type of temperament, and take as much trouble to gain and keep their friendship as wives take to keep their husbands.”
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“Only one thing is right, and that is the Truth, but nobody knows what it is. It is a thing that changes all the time, and then comes back to the same thing.”
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“Only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them.”
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“When a civilization loses simplicity, it becomes increasingly full of troubles and degenerates. People become slaves of external ideas, thoughts, ambitions and social systems.”
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“A good traveler does not know where he is going to, a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.”
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“Regard life with passion to see its manifest forms, do away with passion to see the Secret of Life.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
Chapters:
1. The Unnamed
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“The principal teaching of Lao Tzu is humility... gentleness, resignation, the futility of contention, the strength of weakness.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
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“Above all, the one important message of Taoism is the oneness and spirituality of the material universe.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
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“Chuang Tzu scoffed a the glitter of success, lambasted the great... What was philosophy in Lao Tzu became poetry in Chuang Tzu.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
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“I would characterize the Confucian political ideal as strictly anarchism, in which moral culture of the people making government unnecessary become the ideal. If it is asked why the people of Chinatown in New York never have any use for the the police, the answer is Confucianism. There never were any police in China for 4000 years.”
from Wisdom of China and India
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“People need to learn how to regulate their lives socially and not just rely upon the law. The law should be the resort of the scoundrel... for 4000 years, China had no police.”
from Wisdom of China and India
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“when we speak of democracy as a way of life and talk of the spirit of democracy, we can talk about 'Chinese democracy'—the idea of government for the people and by the consent of the people, but not government by the people and of the people. While parliamentary government is based on distrust of the ruler, Confucian ideals emphasized moral harmony as the basis of political harmony, laissez faire as the key policy and only one that has ever worked; the Great Chinese empire was always ruled without police depending—not on government or soldiers—but on the self-government of the people.”
from Wisdom of China and India
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“The principle of leveling of all opposites, and the theory of cycles and universal reversion to opposites are basic for the understanding of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu philosophy and its practical teachings. All Lao Tzu's paradoxes arise from this point of view.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
Chapters:
2. The Wordless Teachings
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“This chapter seems to be the summing up of Lao Tzu's teachings in a nutshell. Most basic of all is the statement of the principle of reversion... each ending becoming a new beginning. The life of things passes by like a rushing, galloping horse, changing at every turn, at every hour.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
Chapters:
40. Returning
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“Chuang Tzu felt the sorrow of man's short life on this earth and was fascinated by the mystery of dearth. He constantly expressed this feeling with the gifted pen of a poet... What was philosophy in Lao Tzu often became poetry in the younger Taoist disciple.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
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“Confucians worship culture and reason; Taoists reject them in favor of nature and intuition, and the one who rejects anything always seems to stand on a higher level and therefore always seems more attractive than the one who accepts it... Lao Tzu's aphorisms communicate an excitement which Confucian humdrum good sense cannot. Confucian philosophy is a philosophy of social order, and order is seldom exciting.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
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“The first reaction of anyone scanning the Tao Te Ching is laughter; the second reaction, laughter at one's own laughter; and the third, a feeling that this sort of teaching is very much needed today.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
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“While Lao Tzu spoke in aphorisms, Chuang Tzu wrote long, discursive philosophical essays. While Lao Tzu was all intuition, Chuang Tzu was all intellect. Lao Tzu smiled; Chuang Tzu laughed. Lao Tzu taught; Chuang Tzu scoffed. Lao Tzu spoke to the heart; Chuang Tzu spoke to the mind. Lao Tzu was like Whitman; Chuang Tzu was like Thoreau. Lao Tzu was like Rousseau; Chuang Tzu was like Voltaire.”
from Wisdom of Laotse
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“that politics must be subordinated to morals, that government is a makeshift of temporization, law a superficial instrument of order, and police force a foolish invention for morally immature individuals”
from Wisdom of China and India
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“Only a robust mind like that of Walt Whitman who was not inflicted with the scientific spirit and who was in close touch with life itself and with the great humanity could retain that enormous love and enormous faith in the common man.”
from Wisdom of China and India
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“If there is one book in the whole of Oriental literature which one should read above all others, it is, in my opinion, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. If there is one book that can claim to interpret for us the spirit of the Orient, or that is necessary to understanding of characteristic Chinese behavior, including literally 'the ways that are dark,' it is the Tao Te Ching.”
from Wisdom of China and India
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“Does the West have a philosophy? The answer is clearly, 'No'. We need a philosophy of living and we clearly haven't got it... There are professors of philosophy, but there are no philosophers... philosophy itself has become a branch of physics or biology or mathematics.”
from Wisdom of China and India
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“Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India or hope to share the freedom and equality... we are trying to create out of this morally and politically chaotic world... India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trigonometry, quadratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy that inspired Goethe, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.”
from Wisdom of China and India
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“There had to be one Su Tungpo (Su Shi), but there could not be two... The mention of Su Tungpo always elicits an affectionate and warm admiring smile in China.”
from The Gay Genius (1947)
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“One of the most biting satirists of Chinese culture... Lusin is God to the leftist writers of China today... [he] represents the Literature of Revolt. But this is in itself a sign of life... China needed a man like Lusin to wake the millions up from the self-complacency and lethargy and the accumulated inertia of 4000 years.”
from Wisdom of China and India
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“Confucianism stood for a rationalized social order through the ethical approach, based on personal cultivation. It aimed at political order by laying the basis for it in a moral order, and it sought political harmony by trying to achieve the moral harmony in man himself. Thus its most curious characteristic was the abolition of the distinction between politics and ethics.”
from Wisdom of Confucius (1938)
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“The human desire to see only one phase of the truth which we happen to perceive, and to develop and elevate it into a perfect logical system is one reason why our philosophy is bound to grow stranger to life.”
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“He who talks about truth injures it; he who tries to prove it thereby maims and distorts it; he who gives it a label and a school of thought kills it; and he who declares himself a believer buries it.”
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“The human habit of seeing only one phase of the truth, which happens to lie before our eyes and raising the developing it into a perfect system of logic is the reason our philosophy necessarily becomes more and more estranged from life.”
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“God never made a more perfect creature than Ben Franklin... Above all, he had a clear mind, and it was from that clear, equitable temper of mind that the warm glow of humor and serenity flowed through his writings... he always knew what he wanted and was happy about it... Above all, his was always a searching mind. If anything, he was original.”
from On the Wisdom of America (1950)
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“Whitman became really entertaining, when he tried to connect democracy with sex... In a mental daze, he thought of the words 'love' and 'friendship' and 'brotherhood,' which should be the strong bond of a democracy... Here the words 'love' and friendship' became confused or rather fused with the 'fierce affection' of sex.”
from On the Wisdom of America (1950)
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“Why did Emerson endorse Leaves of Grass... Emerson, the symbol of American idealism and intellectual and moral probity? Whitman himself knew that the book was 'an incongruous hash of mud and gold.'”
from On the Wisdom of America (1950)
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“The great thing about laughter is laughter itself. Let's not try to explain it.”
from On the Wisdom of America (1950)
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“There is nothing so intimate in a man's life, or in a woman's, as marriage, nothing that goes so far toward leaving an imprint on the texture of life and on man's soul itself.”
from On the Wisdom of America (1950)
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“When philosophy becomes colored with emotion and teaches a reverent attitude toward the universe, it becomes religion.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“among the inmates of an insane asylum you never find a successful carrot-grower”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Of all the unhappy people in the world,the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“The basis of all religions is the cold fact of human mortality... Death is an ugly fact, but it is fascinating. It has fascinated men's minds from the Inca Indians to the most modern poets. It is probably the only thing that makes men thoughtful. We dislike it, we abhor it, and yet we are fascinated by the terror of extinction.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“happiness comes from work and from the feeling of joy and peace when a job is well done... making things, producing things, and getting something done which we may be proud of, is the best reward of this life.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Both men and women love to exaggerate the differences.. a sort of covert war between the sexes... women are extraordinarily like the male... apart from a plus and a minus here and there, women are extraordinarily like the good, glorious, cocksure, and vain male animal.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Truth we shall never know; it is only clarity we are striving for... even more important than knowing the truths is the general unsettling of our complacent beliefs and gilt-edged assumptions... No one begins to think until he has some of that brute complacency thoroughly thrashed out of him with the rawhide of wiser minds.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“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.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Wisdom is principally a sense of proportion, more often a sense of our human limitations... a keen sense of what we are not—that we are not gods, for instance”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“William James was an American phenomenon, crude, free, forever curious and undisciplinable.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“it would be easier for the president of Palmolive to concede the virtue of Ivory soap than for an Episcopalian bishop to concede the merits in Baptist theology.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“professional philosophers are usually only apologists absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“I believe Franklin was never unhappy”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“I believe in the immortality of works, of the influence of all we do and all we say... the immortality of the race... Franklin is immortal today in the lightening rod and the stove he produced, in the American postal service, the American Philosophical Society, even in the very Republic of the United States itself. Thomas Edison lives for me every time I turn on a switch or watch a movie... Luther Burbank every time I eat a Burbank pear. The Wright Brothers live every time an airplane flies. Is this not enough, O discontented Man?”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“No matter how important or unimportant we are... Good, bad, or indifferent, big or small, our influences continue; the things we do and the words we say live after us in the huge stream of life that goes on forever... we go on punishing and rewarding those who live after us.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Any time we lose heart, any time we are lonely, if we take up Grayson we shall recover our confidence in life and faith in our fellow men... his philosophy of life is a native American one... he found his way to what Thoreau called the 'kernel' of living... when I find a man with such serenity of spirit, he compels my respect, for I know he has achieved something that the world in general and the modern world in particular sadly lack.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“it is the human being's capacity for dreaming, his unwillingness to accept the gray wall of facts as his prison, his power of ... sallying forth to seek the adventure of the unknown and unrealized, that is the ticket to his redemption.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“without the spirit of romance and a certain amount of artful self-deception, life would be unlivable.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“In old age Emerson revealed an unsuspected gift for drawing personal portraits. He possessed the full power of analysis and criticism... his criticism of socialism and all social reforms. Brook Farm community project shows a penetrating insight valid still today.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“the sex act is always slightly ridiculous in its animal aspects and can become beautiful only by the evocation of the spiritual emotions of love”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“if you are susceptible to good poetry, your heart may skip a beat or you may grow cold and numb... He will show you a pebble, an iceman, a book agent and unravel for you the inner mystery and beauty of pulsating life beneath the surface of our everyday existence.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Tao Yuanming, that farmer poet, a man whose good cheer and inner content come from the fact that he has completely made peace with himself and with this good earth... The greatest Chinese poets tried to imitate him, but have not succeeded”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“There is some profound reflection and extraordinarily beautiful writing by this gifted philosopher. For not often is a philosopher also a poet and a born writer... Santayana's philosophy of animal faith may be described as a disillusioned, but sweet, acceptance of our finite existence.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Of all human vices, the greatest is ingratitude, and we must conclude that the world looks sick because the soul looking on it is sick.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Beauty? What is it but a new way of approach?... that ardent inner curiosity which is the only true foundation for the appreciation of beauty—for beauty is inward, not outward... a flower blooms in our dooryard more wonderful that the shining heights of the Alps!”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Montaigne is the prince; his essays are the perfectly urbane expression of a man who kept his mind clear and his blood sweet.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“At its best life is short; half of its felicities are illusions and the other half are fatal in their consequences. There is little of which we can be certain, and much of which we must be regretful or ashamed.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“The human soul is nine-tenths subliminal urges representing the animal heritage of millions of years and considerably less than one-tenth conscious reason, which has had great development only since ten thousand years ago,”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“The medieval theologians gave us, on rather dogmatic grounds, two things, a 'soul' and 'original sin'... without a soul there would be nothing to save and without original sin there would be no need of saving it.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“myths represent certain broad human generalizations of the early perceptions of man and these perceptions are as good as our own.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“But before the advent of modern psychology, it was the Hindus who had probed most into the regions of the urges of animal life, and the whole yoga doctrine is but an experiment to place under yoke or control these lower subconscious animal urges.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“a first-rate scientist is never a man condemned to knowledge without insight, sticking to his facts like a mole and unable to look beyond the facts to their meaning, their mystery, and their glory.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Holmes had a mental sweep and an expansive imagination rarely equaled... I still find Holmes the most satisfying.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“The disease of specialization, of sheer accumulation of facts, has eaten into this realm of study”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“I may venture to say that Thoreau's Walden is overrated; it is too labored... Peattie's A Prairie Grove is a superior literary work, superior not only in accuracy but as writing and in breadth of insight and learning and in philosophy backed by a true scientit's imagination.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Albert Einstein has repeatedly stated his belief in the organization of the world for peace by some kind of world government... I have the strongest hope that the new type of world organization that his piercing mind sees so clearly may be realized... His second vision may save the world, which his first vision, in the hands of bat-eyed politicians, could be exploited to destroy.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“The great end of any man's existence is to find his place in life—and that is the secret of contentment.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Emerson was capable of wonder. He was not a naturalist, or a specialist, but a philosopher who saw life steadily and saw it whole.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“that sadness, that refusal to yield to illusion, is the beginning of a wise philosophy of living.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Wisdom begins with the elimination of uncertainties... Knowing what we cannot do, we do what we can, and arrange ourselves accordingly.. common sense and wistfulness about living, are the ingredients of human wisdom.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“The idea of the infinite capacity of the individual was developed by Mencius. His philosophy is Emersonian, or Emerson's philosophy is Mencian in this respect, and Mencius' influence on young men has always been like that of Emerson.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“How to select our spectacles through which to look at life is all a matter of personal choice... It is all a frame of mind, this enjoyment of living.. Things don't give us anything except what we bring to the enjoyment of them.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“A wise man would be careful not to let any particular frame of mind settle down into a permanent attitude... A crusty old fool will delight in being just a crusty old fool, and a young sophisticated cynic will wallow in his cynicism.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“what is this heaven and earth except a vast play of forces, of rays shooting, waves vibrating, colors changing, vapors rising, mists descending, clouds sailing, waters falling, the sun setting, the moon rising, grass growing, and all things aspiring to live in the light of the sun?”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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“Only people who live on cement streets and carpeted floors can ever forget the inherent drama in nature and, by mere habits of city living, become nature-blind.”
from On the Wisdom of America, 1950
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