Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
Pearl S. BuckRead
If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born myself...a human being.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the value of human existence and the meaningfulness of life itself, even in the absence of an afterlife.
Pearl S. Buck's quote highlights the idea that the current life we live holds significant worth, and the experiences we gather as human beings make our existence valuable. It suggests that regardless of what may lie beyond this life, the journey and experiences we face in the here and now are sufficient to justify our existence, encouraging appreciation for life as it is.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a graduation speech to inspire students about the importance of their existence.
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.
The human condition: lost in thought.
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.
We must cast away everything which hinders us upon our road towards heaven β the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life; the love of riches, pleasures and honors, the spirit of lukewarmness and carelessness and indifference about the things of God β all must be rooted out and forsaken if we are anxious for the prize. We must mortify the deeds of the body, we must crucify our affections for this world.
Souls who can recognize God in the most trivial, the most grievous and the most mortifying things that happen to them in their lives, honor everything equally with delight and rejoicing, and welcome with open arms what others dread and avoid.
This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.
The goal of the Transcendental Meditation technique is the state of enlightenment. This means we experience that inner calmness, that quiet state of least excitation, even when we are dynamically busy.
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