Lin Yutang Quotes

I like writing about what to me are like questions that I have about myself and the human condition. I find quantum physics fascinating, so I like to write about that, and I like things that make me laugh.

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a simple, mechanized mind as its psychology would from ours; because something that must underlie and perhaps be even greater than sex is involved.

The human condition is endlessly fascinating to me, and the existential horrors of life are what drive our imaginations and theater in general.

These powers of imagination and creativity are among the few things that set us apart from the rest of life on Earth. But they make all the difference.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.

Man is the only animal that can be bored.

And what is the great thing that the stage does? It cultivates the imagination. And . . . the imagination constitutes the great difference between human beings. . . . The imagination is the mother of pity, the mother of generosity, the mother of every possible virtue. It is by the imagination that you are enabled to put yourself in the place of another.

We invent what we love and what we fear.

for in the absence of God he had found Man. Man killing man, man helping man, both of them anonymous: the scourge and the blessing.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will.

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence

If you're alive, you're a creative person.

My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

Fancy, an animal faculty, is very different from imagination, which is intellectual. The former is passive; but the latter is active and creative. Children, the weak minded, and the timid are full of fancy. Men and women of intellect, of great intellect, are alone possessed of great imagination.

I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

Man tends to think that he is a creator, that he is like God. This is especially true of intellectuals, and in the last century, intellectuals tended to forget that they were like everyone else. Writing this book was a description of man going from a state of God back to a state of man, back to being a normal person.

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.