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 will never cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food.
Interpretation
Food security is essential for societal stability and peace.
Pearl S. Buck's quote highlights the fundamental role that food security plays in ensuring a peaceful and stable society. When people have certainty about their food supply, they can focus on higher aspirations and community development, rather than being consumed by fear and uncertainty over basic survival needs. This underlying principle connects the availability of food to the overall health and progress of society.
In practice
During a community meeting about poverty alleviation, this quote can emphasize the importance of food programs.
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,” Madame Wu said. “You 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.
Simply stated, testimony-real testimony, born of the Spirit and confirmed by the Holy Ghost-changes lives. It changes how you think and what you do. It changes what you say. It affects every priority you set and every choice you make.
It's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and—without even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.
Take away the contests of the martyrs, and you have taken away their crowns.
While society cannot provide employment for its members, the production/work/income nexus has to be abandoned as a justification for our present parsimony to the unemployed. An assumption cannot be used to justify making second-class citizens of those who are unfortunate enough to constitute living proof of the inaccuracy of that assumption.
In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.
We are prone to see what lies behind our eyes, rather than what apprears before them.
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