"The Pleasures of a Nonconformist"

[fiefoe]

This is perhaps the first time that I've read an English book written by a compatriot. He must have been a comfortable person to talk to - 'I have lived long enough to know that no one can convince anybody by words unless he is convinced already anyway.'; 'Blessed is the man who knows a thing is so without being able to explain why it is so.'

Lin Yutang, born in 1895, was of the generation who still had the luxury of a traditional education, and had a very good idea what being Chinese meant. Consequently, what he said about the Chinese, circa mid-20th century, is quite illuminating.

• The Chinese have committed greater sins of logic than any cultured nation I know.
• The distrust of words is inherent in Chinese thinking.
  
• In Laotse I find the first philosophic justification of the Sermon on the Mount.
  
• Voltaire is reported to have communicated with Emperor Chienlung through a Father Amiot. 
• If one closes one eye, the world always appears flat, more like a picture, and one does not feel so involved in it. This may be called the picturesque view of life.
  
• I am by habit a Confucian, but by nature a Taoist. ... Taoism and Confucianism represent merely two moods of the same man. A Chinese gentleman is always a Confucian when he is a success, and a Taoist when he is a failure.
  
• I do not see what is so comfortable about ... having no chairs to sit on at cocktail parties.
  
• There is a certain pathos about Chinese humanism and a certain cheerfulness in acceptance of life... The absence of religion makes it a little sad, makes it poetic, makes it what I call a sensitized philosophy of living... The end of life is the wise enjoyment of it.
  

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Heard on "Wait, Wait": man to half-drowned chicken before performing mouth-to-beak - "You are too young to die!"