Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
Pearl S. BuckRead
We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the hypocrisy of wanting to save others spiritually while denying them basic rights and access.
Pearl S. Buck's quote critiques the double standards held by societies that profess to care for others' spiritual well-being yet simultaneously restrict their physical presence and rights. It illustrates a disconnect between altruistic intentions and practical actions, emphasizing the importance of consistency in one's values and principles, particularly in matters of compassion and inclusion.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about immigration policies and humanitarian efforts in a societal context.
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.
I am that prodigal son who wasted all the portion entrusted to me by my father. But I have not yet fallen at my father's knees. I have not yet begun to put away from me the enticements of my former riotous living.
I try to design into a world that is constantly moving, and moving me.
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.
Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.
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