“The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious, is it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.”
Source: The Importance of Living (1937), Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 13
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Lin Yutang 67
Chinese writer 1895–1976Related quotes
“The world has far too much morality.”
p 474
The Better Angels of our Nature (2011)
“Too far-fetched to believe, too obvious to ignore.”
“We are islands, but never too far
We are islands, and I need your light tonight…”
Song lyrics, Islands (1987)
On never expressing anger in his comedy in “Trevor Noah interview” https://www.timeout.com/london/comedy/trevor-noah-interview in Time Out
Personal life
Talks in Europe 1968, 5th Public Talk, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (22 May 1968) Collected Works, Vol. XV
1960s
Context: We need tremendous energy to bring about a psychological change in ourselves as human beings, because we have lived far too long in a world of make-belief, in a world of brutality, violence, despair, anxiety. To live humanly, sanely, one has to change. To bring about a change within oneself and therefore within society, one needs this radical energy, for the individual is not different from society — the society is the individual and the individual is the society. And to bring about a necessary radical, essential change in the structure of society — which is corrupt, which is immoral — there must be change in the human heart and mind. To bring about that change you need great energy and that energy is denied or perverted, or twisted, when you act according to a concept; which is what we do in our daily life. The concept is based on past history, or on some conclusion, so it is not action at all, it is an approximation to a formula. So one asks if there is an action which is not based on an idea, on a conclusion formed by dead things which have been.
Source: The Partly Cloudy Patriot (2003)