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.
You are not in the world...the world is in you," what did he mean? [That is, you are not in the world," that is, there is no "you" that is real or in any world. "The world is in you" means that the world is in your "mind" and is nothing more than a figment of your programming-and-conditioning-induced imaginings.]
One thing you can't hide - is when you're crippled inside.
We live today not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.
In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.
A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?
We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
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