You can't plan for bad luck in the long winter of life

Wisdom is age and age is wisdom. Confucius, summing up his life, said, "At 70 I followed my heart's desire without overstepping the line." It's as good a definition of wisdom as any.

The reverence children owed their parents was boundless but not burdensome — joyously given. Not in Confucius' own day (551-479 B.C.) — by then this was already once-upon-a-time stuff. "Nowadays," he lamented, "for a man to be filial means no more than that he is able to provide his parents with food. Even hounds and horses are, in some way, provided with food. If a man shows no reverence, where is the difference?"