Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung
Pearl S. BuckRead
Science and religion, religion and science, put it as it may, they are the two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two focus together, reveal the truth.
Interpretation
Science and religion are interconnected perspectives that, when combined, help us understand the truth more clearly.
This quote by Pearl S. Buck suggests that science and religion, despite their apparent differences, are complementary in the quest for truth. They represent two viewpoints that together can provide a fuller understanding of existence, as each sheds light on different aspects of our reality. Without the merging of these perspectives, our understanding remains incomplete, emphasizing the importance of dialogue between the two fields.
In practice
In a speech about the interplay between different ways of knowing
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.
Take away all your labels and you are the Infinite Being.
Do not delay in coming to grace, but hasten, lest the robber outstrip you, lest the adulterer pass you by, lest the insatiate be satisfied before you, lest the murderer seize the blessing first, or the publican or the fornicator, or any of these violent ones who take the Kingdom of heaven by force (cf. Mt. 11:12). For it suffers violence willingly, and is tyrannized over through goodness.
Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.
Every decision you make - every decision that you make every second - is not a decision about what to do, it is a decision about who you are. Every act is an act of self-definition.
If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans and the very dream that is America.
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