Linyutang
Excerpts from Lin Yutang’s
The Importance of Living

I would like to share here some excerpts from Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. The book and the author has been influential in my way of looking and appreciating things specially from an Oriental point of view. The book was first published in 1937 and is one of the original “don’t worry, be happy” books. The Chinese philosopher here expounds on the mindset people need to develop in order to have a more successful and peaceful life. Lin Yutang’s wisdom is timelier than ever and finds a wider audience among today’s too-busy-to-breathe global culture.


“The aim of education or culture is merely the development of good taste in knowledge and good form in conduct. The cultured man or the ideal educated man is not necessarily one who is well-read or learned, but one who likes and dislikes the right things. To know what to love and what to hate is to have taste in knowledge. Nothing is more exasperating than to meet a person at a party whose mind is crammed full of historical dates and figures and who is extremely well posted on current affairs but whose attitude or point of view is all wrong. I have met such persons, and found that there was no topic which they did not have some facts or figures to produce, but whose points of view are deplorable. Erudition is a mere matter of cramming of facts or information, while taste or discernment is a matter of artistic judgement. In speaking of a scholar, the Chinese generally distinguish between a man’s scholarship, conduct, and or taste or discernment. This is particularly so with regard to historians; a book of history may be written with the most fastidious scholarship, yet be lacking in insight or discernment, and in the judgement or interpretation of persons and events in history, the author may show no originality or depth of understanding. Such a person, we say, has no taste in knowledge. To be well-informed or to accumulate facts and details, is the easiest of all things. There are many facts in a given historical period that can be easily crammed into our mind, but discernment in the selection of significant facts is a vastly more difficult thing and depends upon one’s point of view.

An educated man therefore, is one who has the right loves and hatreds. This we call taste, and with taste comes charm. Now to have taste or discernment requires a capacity for thinking things through to the bottom, an independence of judgement, and an unwillingness to be bulldozed by any form of humbug, social, political, literary, artistic, or academic. There is no doubt we are surrounded in our adult life with a wealth of humbugs: fame humbugs, wealth humbugs, patriotic humbugs, political humbugs, dictators and humbug psychologists. When a psycho-analyst tells us that the functions of the bowels during childhood has a definite connection with ambition and aggressiveness and sense of duty in one’s later life, or that constipation leads to stinginess of character, all that a man with taste can do is feel amused. When a man is wrong, he is wrong, and there is no need for one to be impressed and overawed by a great name or by the number of books he has read and we haven’t.

Taste, then, is closely associated with courage, as the Chinese always associate shih with tan, and courage or independence of judgement, as we know, is such a rare virtue among mankind. We see this intellectual courage or independence during the childhood of all thinkers and writers who in later life amount to anything. Such a person refuses to like a certain poet even if he has the greatest vogue during his time; then when he truly likes a poet, he is able to say why he likes him, and it is an appeal to his inner judgement. This is what we call taste in literature. He also refuses to give his approval to the current school of painting, if it jars upon his artistic instinct. This is taste in art. He also refuses to be impressed by a philosophic vogue or fashionable theory, even though it were backed by the greatest name. He is unwilling to be convinced by any author until he is convinced at heart; if the author convinces him, then the author is right, but if the author cannot convince him, then he is right and the author is wrong. This is taste in knowledge. No doubt such intellectual courage or independence of judgement requires certain childish, naïve confidence in oneself, but this self is the only thing that can one can cling to, and the moment a student gives up his right of personal judgement, he is in for accepting all the humbugs of life.”

Lin Yutang (1895-1976), Chinese writer and philologist, born in Changzhou, and educated at Saint John’s University in Shanghai, Harvard University, and the University of Leipzig. From 1923 to 1926 he taught English philology at the University of Beijing. He subsequently devised a Chinese indexing system and helped formulate the official plan for romanizing the Chinese language. After 1928 he lived mainly in the U.S. His many works represent an attempt to bridge the cultural gap between East and West. The first two books, My Country and My People (1935) and The Importance of Living (1937), written in English in a charming and witty style, brought him international fame. Others include Between Tears and Laughter (1943), The Chinese Theory of Art (1967), and the novels Moment in Beijing (1939) and The Vermillion Gate (1953).