Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
Interpretation
The passage of time is perceived differently depending on one's age and life experience.
This quote reflects on the subjective nature of time and its significance in human life. For young people, five years can seem like a large portion of their life, filled with change and development, whereas for older individuals, it may be seen as a much smaller measure of time, often overshadowed by the decades that have preceded it. It invites us to consider how our perception of time is influenced by our age and life stage.
In practice
During a graduation speech to emphasize the importance of every moment in youth.
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.
God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness . He is not in the general. He is in the particular.
Idling is important. Most people don't know how. They're afraid of it. This explains why they turn on the television set or pick up the newspaper. They think they have to be doing something.
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
A timid dog barks more violently than it bites. Curtius Canis timidus vehementius latrat quam mordet
Do good with what thou hast, or it will do thee no good.
There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
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