Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Young people often lack the wisdom to be cautious, leading them to take bold risks that can result in remarkable achievements.
This quote by Pearl S. Buck highlights the unique perspective of youth, which is characterized by a lack of caution and an unbridled willingness to take risks. It suggests that the youth's ignorance of potential consequences enables them to pursue ambitious goals that older generations might deem unattainable. This cycle of youthful ambition leads to new successes and innovations over time, as young people challenge the status quo and redefine what is possible.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can inspire young entrepreneurs at a startup event to take bold steps in their business ventures.
More from Pearl S. Buck
All quotes βYou 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.
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"He passed over his fall, and appointed him first of the Apostles; wherefore He said: ' 'Simon, Simon,' etc. (in Ps. cxxix. 2). God allowed him to fall, because He meant to make him ruler over the whole world, that, remembering his own fall, he might forgive those who should slip in the future. And that what I have said is no guess, listen to Christ Himself saying: 'Simon, Simon, etc.'"
Enlightenment is the key to everything, and it is the key to intimacy, because it is the goal of true authenticity.