Reality - Dreams = Animal Being Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism Dreams + Humor = Fantasy Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
Lin YutangRead
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Embracing leisure and idleness can lead to a deeper understanding of life.
This quote by Lin Yutang suggests that the ability to enjoy idle time without any specific purpose is a sign of a well-lived life. It emphasizes the importance of taking a break from the constant pressures of productivity, allowing oneself to appreciate simply being, which can lead to greater wisdom and contentment.
Themes
LeisureIdlenessLifeWisdomLivingAfternoon
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about work-life balance, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of downtime.
More from Lin Yutang
All quotes βTrue peace of mind comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think it means a release of energy.
Lin YutangRead
All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
Lin YutangRead
This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
Lin YutangRead
It is that unoccupied space which makes a room habitable, as it is our leisure hours which make life endurable.
Lin YutangRead
The wise man reads both books and life itself.
Lin YutangRead
Similar quotes
Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.
Walter PaterRead
In thy face I see the map of honour, truth and loyalty.
William ShakespeareRead
Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.
Seneca The YoungerRead
The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
David HarveyRead
Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise.
Stanislav GrofRead
At the beginning of my career, I visited a Sudanese refugee camp in Uganda and saw a two-year-old girl die before my eyes. The technical term for what this girl experienced, when you are too thin and malnourished for your size, is childhood wasting. And it was, indeed, a waste. A young life - with all its potential - gone forever.
Linda Thomas-GreenfieldRead