Pearl S. Buck Quotes

Life is stronger than death.

I learned to distinguish between the two kinds of people in the world: those who have known inescapable sorrow and those who have not.

Can such stiff and formal moldings as words capture the spirit-essence of love?

To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)

The rich are always afraid.

and his voice came from him in a whisper,

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.

Learn the good that you can of the foreign people and reject the unsuitable.

This is I. I am as you see me. I do not care to be otherwise.

None on earth can love those who declare that they alone are the sons of God.

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds.

It is easy to overthrow a government but very difficult to build a new one ...

A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated - and turned out to grass.

Nothing is menial where there is love.

The tears of the old come as easily as the tears of children,

Some mothers are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together

Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless.

There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses.

Well, and they must all starve if the plants starve." 'It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth' (Buck, 71).

Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure.

If I have learned anything in my long life it is to be grateful for every occasion when I followed my sympathies and avoided my antipathies.

However impatient she might be in the day, however filled with little sudden angers, at night she was all tenderness.

From the stars," she thought, "doubtless all things are seen.

Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.

Drive out the tiger by the front gate and let in the wolf by the back gate, ...

The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change.

Life is the wonder with which we are all infused.

I reminded myself that time takes care of many things. Asia had thought me that.

None but the ignorant can be bored by life. To the lovers of learning, life is pure adventure shared with adventurers.

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.

When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members

Nations, like individuals, can only learn by their own individual experience." Yul-chun

Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.

God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness . He is not in the general. He is in the particular.

It was Wang Lung's marriage day.

I should like to penetrate your mind with my own," he said. "I should like to pierce the mysteries of your soul.

Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.

I don't wait for moods - you'd never get anything done if you did.

If life were known one moment ahead, how could it be endured?

And roots, if they are to bear fruits, must be kept well in the soil of the land.

God - if there is a God - would not choose one man above another or one people above another.

There is no beauty without order.

When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there.

It is easy to destroy but hard to create. Remember that, when you want to destroy something." The

The vicious result of privilege is that the creature who receives it becomes incapacitated by it as by a disease.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

It certainly must have been a relief for women of the country to realize that one could be a woman and a lady and yet be thoroughly political.

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.

Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

Men cannot be free in a nation where women are forbidden freedom.

wept, and in the wrinkles of old people. In the house of the Manchu Bannerman,

We must have hope or starve to death.

We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights.

It is better not to say "lend." There is only giving.

The superior man leads not by violence or by coarse physical acts but by the pure intelligence of a wise mind.

The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.

Times were chosen and appointed. If one forced them, they were wrong.

When people work beyond their destiny, all they do fails.

When we define democracy now it must still be as a thing hoped for but not seen.

This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him.

To know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe. from Pavilion of Women page 292

thing and it could be sold for a heap of silver and sometimes

All birth is unwilling.

Happiness was waiting to be chosen.

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.

You cannot be happy unless you understand that life is sad.

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

We are compelled to choose," he sometimes complained, "between the savagery of Communism and the vulgarism of America.

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.

It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.

The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between men and women.

No daughter is ever her mother's darling. That spot is always reserved for the son.

A hungry man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food.

It is worse than folly ... not to recognize the truth, for in it lies the tinder for tomorrow.

At heart a truly modest man, he had nevertheless the modest man's pride in his modesty in the face of achievement.

Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.

Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.

The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon.

I don't know, Pierce. But I do know that when men are frightened and discontented they gather around any man who is not afraid.

There will never cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food.

One faces the future with one's past.

Only people who are assured of daily food can concern themselves with matters of principle and ethic. A man will become a slave rather than starve.

Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.

Can one spit on a smiling face?" he inquired; or he said, "Vengeance cannot last a night's sleep.

He had other fires and these flamed higher than Love.

When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.

He could have been lonely except that he was never lonely, since he had always been alone.

Fatalism is a false premise. What will be is not necessarily what must be ...

Vermont is a country unto itself.