Quotes from yutang lin ii

Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.

Is it not tragic, for example, that while in the last World War almost everyone believed it was the war to end all wars and wanted to make it so, now in this Second World War almost no writer that I have read dares even suggest that this is the war to end all wars, or act on that belief? We have lost the courage to hope.

There is more hope in a heather rose than in all the tons of Teutonic philosophy.

Only friendship which can stand occasional plain speaking is worth having.

The humour of the Chinese people in inventing gunpowder and finding its best use in making firecrackers for their grandfathers' birthdays is merely symbolical of their inventiveness along merely pacific lines.

All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell.

I am able to confess because, unlike these patriots, I am not ashamed of my country. And I can lay bare her troubles because I have not lost hope. China is bigger than her little patriots, and does not require their whitewashing. She will, as she always did, right herself again.

The only part of Christian teachings which will be truly accepted by the Chinese people is Christ's injunction to be "harmless as doves" but "wise as serpents."

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.

Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.

[China] is the least concerned about her own salvation. Like a good gambler, she took the loss of a slice of territory the size of Germany itself without a wince.

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world.

I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content.

The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious ... it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.

I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing.

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.