Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang was a Chinese writer, linguist, and inventor. A prolific bilingual writer in both Chinese and English, he was celebrated for pioneering a humorous prose style in modern Chinese literature and for serving as a cultural bridge between China and the West, most notably through My Country and My People (1935) and his English translations of Chinese classics. As a linguist, he compiled a series of ESL textbooks for Chinese learners in the 1930s and later produced an English–Chinese dictionary in the 1970s.
Career Journey
Background
- Born in
- Banzai
- Educated at
- Harvard UniversityLeipzig UniversitySt. John's University
- Doctoral Advisors
- 🎓 August Conrady
Trending & Selected Quotes
Trending topics shown first"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live"
"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials."
"Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise."
"The Chinese believe that when there are too many policemen, there can be no individual liberty, when there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice, and when there are too many soldiers, there ca…"
"While in the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them, as anybody who has a knowledge of Chinese literature will testify."
"What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to th…"
Works & Publications
No works or publications documented yet.
Timeline
1895
Born
Birth1976
Died
Death
Influenced By
Thinkers whose ideas shaped Lin's philosophy
Source Attribution
Information about Lin Yutang is sourced from curated knowledge bases and cross-referenced for accuracy. Influence relationships are scored by thematic overlap and historical plausibility.
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