Lin Yutang Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Lin Yutang was born in 1895 in Fujian, China, into a Christian family headed by a minister-father who valued literacy and moral instruction. He grew up amid the cadences of local dialects, the classical tradition, and the Bible, an unusual combination that later enabled him to blend Confucian, Daoist, and Christian sensibilities with ease. After mission schooling, he entered St. John's University in Shanghai, where rigorous English-language training and exposure to Western literature widened his range. In 1919 he left China for studies abroad, spending a period at Harvard before continuing to Germany, where he earned a doctorate in linguistics at the University of Leipzig. Those years gave him philological tools and a comparative outlook that would suffuse his later essays and translations.

Teacher and Public Intellectual in Republican China
Returning to China in the early 1920s, Lin taught at Peking University and other institutions, guiding students through English literature while experimenting with a supple, conversational Chinese prose. He moved among leading reformist thinkers; friendships and debates with figures such as Hu Shih reinforced his belief that modern Chinese writing should be lucid, humane, and playful rather than heavy with dogma. In Shanghai he wrote for The China Critic and then launched his own magazines, including Analects Fortnightly, This Human World, and Cosmic Wind. These periodicals cultivated the xiaopin, the informal essay, and helped him introduce the modern Chinese term for humor (youmo), arguing that laughter was a civilizing force. His essays sometimes drew fire from sterner literary figures, and he sparred in print with contemporaries who, like Lu Xun, demanded a more militant cultural engagement. Lin stood his ground, insisting that good sense, tolerance, and delight in ordinary life were themselves political antidotes to fanaticism.

Crossing Cultures and Winning an English-Language Audience
In the mid-1930s, Lin began writing directly for English readers. With support from the publisher Richard J. Walsh at the John Day Company and encouragement from Pearl S. Buck, his My Country and My People (1935) and The Importance of Living (1937) became international bestsellers. Their easy humor, quotations from the classics, and affectionate critique of both East and West made him a cultural interpreter at a moment when Americans were eager for a humane account of China. He followed with the panoramic English-language novel Moment in Peking (1939), which traced families through upheavals of late imperial and early Republican times. His accessible style, often peppered with anecdotes from Confucius, Zhuangzi, and the poet Su Dongpo (Su Shi), turned him into a household name among readers seeking wisdom traditions without academic barriers.

War, Advocacy, and Controversy
The Sino-Japanese War and the global conflict of the 1940s thrust Lin into public advocacy. He lectured widely in the United States, raising sympathy for China's plight and moving in circles of relief and diplomacy that included prominent figures such as Soong Mei-ling. At the same time he resisted falling into party orthodoxy, criticizing both the corruption he saw among Nationalists and the authoritarian currents among Communists. His Between Tears and Laughter (1943) expressed impatience with wartime platitudes and questioned American policies toward Asia, a stance that complicated his reputation in the United States even as it underscored his independence of mind. He continued to publish fiction, including A Leaf in the Storm (1941) and Chinatown Family (1948), exploring displacement and immigrant experience.

Translator, Biographer, and Curator of Tradition
Alongside essays and novels, Lin devoted himself to translation and literary portraiture. He helped to popularize Shen Fu's intimate Six Chapters of a Floating Life for modern readers and wrote loving studies of classical figures. The Gay Genius (1947), his biography of Su Dongpo, presented a statesman-poet whose zest for life mirrored Lin's own ideals of resilience, irony, and cultured leisure. He compiled anthologies interpreting Confucian and Daoist thought, seeking to show that China's wisdom traditions, rightly read, were pragmatic, tolerant, and life-affirming. His work as a translator and interpreter kept one foot in the Chinese canon and the other in contemporary English prose, enabling readers in both worlds to recognize each other more clearly.

Inventor and Lexicographer
Lin's curiosity extended beyond letters to machines and systems. He poured years into devising a workable Chinese typewriter and an indexing method that would allow rapid retrieval of characters. The Ming Kwai typewriter embodied his belief that technology should serve living language rather than constrain it; although commercial success eluded the design, its principles anticipated later approaches to inputting Chinese script. His Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage, published late in life, relied on an innovative system to make characters easier to locate and emphasized contemporary meanings and idiom. Scholars, journalists, and students drew on it for guidance in an era when modern vocabulary and classical resonance were colliding daily in print.

Faith, Philosophy, and Personal Life
Lin's spiritual itinerary reflected his cultural method: he began in Protestant Christianity, drifted toward agnosticism informed by Confucian ethics and Daoist ease, and in later years reaffirmed Christian belief while preserving admiration for China's classics. He wrote candidly about this journey in works that joined biblical plainness to Zhuangzi's laughter. At home he relied on the steadfast partnership of his wife, Liao Tsui-feng, whose practical management and calm steadied his restless creativity. Their family life, often evoked in gentle essays about tea, calligraphy, and conversation, produced three daughters; two became well-known writers and translators in their own right, continuing the family's bicultural engagement. Friends from literary and diplomatic circles passed in and out of their households in Shanghai, New York, Hong Kong, and Taipei, stitching his cosmopolitan networks into daily life.

Later Years and Legacy
After the war years and extended stays abroad, Lin divided his time between Hong Kong and Taiwan, where he built a hillside home and continued to write, lecture, and tinker. He never stopped making the case for a humane, leisurely, and skeptical intelligence as the best answer to ideological zeal. In the 1960s and early 1970s he produced further essays, translations, and reference works, refining his defense of ordinary happiness against the claims of utility and rage. He died in 1976, leaving behind shelves of books that taught generations to read across cultural borders without condescension or sentimentality.

Lin Yutang's achievement lies in the way he braided personae that are usually kept apart: the satirical columnist who punctures pretension; the scholar who respects sources; the inventor who trusts systems; and the believer who tests faith by joy. Around him stood a cast of contemporaries whose disagreements sharpened his positions and whose support carried his voice abroad: Hu Shih's pragmatic liberalism, Lu Xun's stern demands, Pearl S. Buck's advocacy, Richard Walsh's editorial care, and the classical presences of Shen Fu and Su Dongpo. Together they formed the web within which Lin fashioned a literary life that made Chinese tradition audible to the world and made the modern world intelligible to Chinese readers.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Lin, under the main topics: Wisdom - Funny - Live in the Moment - Freedom - Hope.