Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
Pearl S. BuckRead
There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
Interpretation
Sorrow can lead to wisdom and a deeper form of happiness.
This quote by Pearl S. Buck suggests that while sorrow is often seen as a negative experience, it can be transformed into wisdom. Through our struggles and challenges, we can gain insights that may not necessarily lead to joy, but can still help us find a meaningful sense of happiness in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
You are free when you gain back yourself,β Madame Wu said. βYou can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.
We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.
To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.
Your failures won't hurt you until you start blaming them on others.
We think we have to become something else to be satisfied, not realizing that being ourselves is the only thing that can satisfy us.
Enlightenment for a wave is the moment the wave realizes it is water. At that moment, all fear of death disappears.
For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains, And disapproves that care, though wise in show, That with superfluous burden loads the day, And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.
Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it's the thing that's really preventing us from taking flight.
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