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 is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
Interpretation
Sorrow can lead to wisdom and a deeper form of happiness.
This quote by Pearl S. Buck suggests that while sorrow is often seen as a negative experience, it can be transformed into wisdom. Through our struggles and challenges, we can gain insights that may not necessarily lead to joy, but can still help us find a meaningful sense of happiness in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
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.
There is only one map to the journey of life and it lives within your heart
There is nothing I can't live without. I learned this attitude when I was a child.
What we learn through failure becomes a precious part of us, strengthening us in everything we do. So let the tough things make you tougher.
Meditation is the means through which the Soul dictates and guides the mind for all good.
Being generous, just helping one's relatives and being blameless in one's actions; this is the best good luck.
Like Jesus, every human being has enough memories in his past to occupy his time and thoughts continually. It is not the remembrance of these incidents but the reliving of them that creates havoc in our souls.
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