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 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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Prepare for old age in a way that allows for peaceful reflection on life and what comes next.
This quote by Pearl S. Buck emphasizes the importance of planning for old age not just in terms of material needs but also in facilitating a state of mind that is open to reflection and meditation on deeper existential questions. It critiques the idea that one’s later years should be consumed by the pressing concerns of worldly desires, suggesting instead that we should cultivate a peaceful state that allows us to contemplate life beyond the physical realm.
Themes
Old AgeMeditationReflectionPreparationWisdom
In practice
Example use cases
This quote would be perfect to inspire an audience at a retirement seminar.
More from Pearl S. Buck
All quotes →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.
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To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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