Pearl Buck Quotes

Life is stronger than death. — Pearl S. Buck

Starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times. — Pearl S. Buck

Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. — Pearl S. Buck

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

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

Learn the good that you can of the foreign people and reject the unsuitable. — Pearl S. Buck

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it. — Pearl S. Buck

We must save ourselves by doing what is godlike and we will become godlike. — Pearl S. Buck

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth. — Pearl S. Buck

It is easy to overthrow a government but very difficult to build a new one ... — Pearl S. Buck

Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought. — Pearl S. Buck

The tears of the old come as easily as the tears of children, — Pearl S. Buck

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

Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession. — Pearl S. Buck

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment. — Pearl S. Buck

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. — Pearl S. Buck

From the stars," she thought, "doubtless all things are seen. — Pearl S. Buck

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death. — Pearl S. Buck

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

For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom. — Pearl S. Buck

The greatest problem that war leaves, in a man, is how to recapture reality. That's because war is unreal. — Pearl S. Buck

The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change. — Pearl S. Buck

To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium. — Pearl S. Buck

steadily for a few minutes because Leah was so beautiful. She looked at herself in the mirror on her dressing table, and it seemed to her that all — Pearl S. Buck

We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage - and indeed perhaps more. — Pearl S. Buck

Life is the wonder with which we are all infused. — Pearl S. Buck

I reminded myself that time takes care of many things. Asia had thought me that. — Pearl S. Buck

Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. — Pearl S. Buck

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

Iowans know themselves and what they are doing. They are doing well. — Pearl S. Buck

Only very coarse persons wanted wars. — Pearl S. Buck

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free. — Pearl S. Buck

The heart never grows old. — Pearl S. Buck

Every mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied. — Pearl S. Buck

To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think. — Pearl S. Buck

It was Wang Lung's marriage day. — Pearl S. Buck

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

Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it. — Pearl S. Buck

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

If life were known one moment ahead, how could it be endured? — Pearl S. Buck

It is not well for a man to know more than is necessary for his daily living. — Pearl S. Buck

All that had been was now no more. — Pearl S. Buck

Make love! He disliked the phrase. Could one make love? — Pearl S. Buck

In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. — Pearl S. Buck

There is no beauty without order. — Pearl S. Buck

Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness. — Pearl S. Buck

An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at. He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can't risk anybody laughing at them. — Pearl S. Buck

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

And to him war was a thing like earth and sky and water and why it was no one knew but only that it was. — Pearl S. Buck

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

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

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness. — Pearl S. Buck

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word-excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it. — Pearl S. Buck

To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind. — Pearl S. Buck

We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country. — Pearl S. Buck

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. — Pearl S. Buck

The only real danger to our country is from within, that we forget our own power to be what we want to be. — Pearl S. Buck

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. — Pearl S. Buck

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

You seem to grieve for what is not so ... and there is no need to let your heart run ahead into evils that may never come. — Pearl S. Buck

Hunger makes a thief of any man. — Pearl S. Buck

Men cannot be free in a nation where women are forbidden freedom. — Pearl S. Buck

On this earth, though far and near, without love, there's only fear. — Pearl S. Buck

All things are possible until they are proven impossible. — Pearl S. Buck

if one can surmount poverty and can love in moderation, there is no obstacle to happiness for anyone. — Pearl S. Buck

The best thing in the world for each of us is that which we can best do, because it gives us the feeling of being useful. That's happiness. — Pearl S. Buck

And looked sharply across the street. There was only one house — Pearl S. Buck

In silence they lay close, without passion, but closer than passion could bring them they lay close. — Pearl S. Buck

wept, and in the wrinkles of old people. In the house of the Manchu Bannerman, — Pearl S. Buck

If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born myself ... a human being. — Pearl S. Buck

To repay evil with kindness is the proof of a good man; a superior man blames himself, a common man blames others. — Pearl S. Buck

What seems new is only new to us. — Pearl S. Buck

We must have hope or starve to death. — Pearl S. Buck

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

It is better not to say "lend." There is only giving. — Pearl S. Buck

And as for equality, are the fingers on one hand equal in length? Each has its place. — Pearl S. Buck

What a man does in his own house cannot concern the nation. — Pearl S. Buck

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

The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals. — Pearl S. Buck

Times were chosen and appointed. If one forced them, they were wrong. — Pearl S. Buck

The country she had taken for granted as her own, where she had been born, whose language alone she spoke, had rejected her and despised her. — Pearl S. Buck

This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night. — Pearl S. Buck

When people work beyond their destiny, all they do fails. — Pearl S. Buck

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

This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him. — Pearl S. Buck

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 — Pearl S. Buck

Hope must come out of what we have, or it is not hope, but a dream. — Pearl S. Buck

From that house there has come so much life that it ought never to die or fall into ruin ... For me that house was a gateway to America. — Pearl S. Buck

thing and it could be sold for a heap of silver and sometimes — Pearl S. Buck

All birth is unwilling. — Pearl S. Buck

Happiness was waiting to be chosen. — Pearl S. Buck

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

You cannot be happy unless you understand that life is sad. — Pearl S. Buck

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. — Pearl S. Buck

For generations fathers had watched earth and sea. — Pearl S. Buck

Believing in gods always causes confusion. — Pearl S. Buck

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

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked. — Pearl S. Buck

The days of my youth are past and to a woman full grown a kiss means everything - or nothing. — Pearl S. Buck

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