Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
Pearl S. BuckRead
The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that those who hold onto prejudices may lack the intelligence or willingness to adapt their views.
Pearl S. Buck's quote highlights the inherent limitations of prejudice, implying that a rigid mindset can inhibit intellectual growth and the ability to embrace new ideas or perspectives. In this sense, the quote serves as a critique of closed-mindedness, urging individuals to recognize the importance of adaptability and open-mindedness for personal development and understanding.
In practice
In a debate about social issues, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of questioning our own biases.
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.
When the soldiers stand leaning on their spears, they are faint from want of food.
When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.
Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape - all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.
God will only give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knows
Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.
There is something suspect about our inability to enjoy anything.
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