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Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old ...
- Wang Lung -- Pearl S. Buck
If a superior man undertakes something and tried to lead,
He goes astray.
But if he follows, he finds guidance.
It is favourable to find friends in the West and South,
and quiet perseverance brings good fortune. -- Pearl S. Buck
Throw eggs at a rock, and though one uses all the eggs in the world, the rock remains the same. -- Pearl S. Buck
[I]n any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until some day inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle. -- Pearl S. Buck
I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking. -- Pearl S. Buck
From the stars," she thought, "doubtless all things are seen. -- Pearl S. Buck
To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. -- Pearl S. Buck
There is one word that can be the guide for your life- it is the word reciprocity. -- 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
When the people of any country choose peace at all costs, not even generals can make war. -- Pearl S. Buck
Love can never be a sin. It can be only a blessing. Even if you're not loved in return
though I can't imagine that
to love is a proof of life
indeed, it's the only proof, for once you can't love another human being, you're not alive. -- Pearl S. Buck
I do not blame you, child, for growing up," she announced. "But I teach you this: Whatever happens is always the woman's fault. -- Pearl S. Buck
Drive out the tiger by the front gate and let in the wolf by the back gate, ... -- Pearl S. Buck
Know thy neighbor as thyself. That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself...this is the meaning of the word LOVE. -- Pearl S. Buck
Exclusion is always dangerous. Inclusion is the only safety if we are to have a peaceful world ... -- Pearl S. Buck
It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late. -- 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 learned to distinguish between the two kinds of people in the world: those who have known inescapable sorrow and those who have not. -- 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
It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty. -- Pearl S. Buck
Integrity is honesty carried through the fibres of the being and the whole mind, into thought as well as action so that the person is complete in honesty. That kind of integrity I put above all else as an essential to leadership. -- 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
As for their child, I am moved in two ways. He will have his own world to make. Being of neither East nor West purely, he will be rejected of each, for none will understand him. But I think, if he has the strength of both his parents, he will understand both worlds, and so overcome. -- 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
Well I know I am ugly and cannot be loved - -- Pearl S. Buck
Fear alone makes man weak. If you are afraid, your hands tremble, your feet falter, and your brain cannot tell hands and feet what to do. -- Pearl S. Buck
The first peaches of spring - the first peaches! Buy, eat, purge your bowels of the poisons of winter! -- Pearl S. Buck
Is man all man and is woman all woman? If so, they will never come together, since he lives for his own being and she lives for universal life, and these are opposites. -- Pearl S. Buck
Happiness was waiting to be chosen. -- Pearl S. Buck
There is no beauty without order. -- Pearl S. Buck
Purposeless activity may be a phase of death. -- Pearl S. Buck
His problem was the eternal question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist - the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release. -- Pearl S. Buck
The old deep sadness of life lay in the bottom of her heart and she knew it was there, but she would not allow herself to sink into it. Out of the dark and sullen bottom of a lake the lotus flowers bloomed upon its surface, and she would pluck the flowers. -- Pearl S. Buck
When foreigners come into a nation, the best way is to make them no longer foreign. That is to say, let us marry our young together and let there be children. War is costly, love is cheap. -- Pearl S. Buck
Liz, it's so easy to say 'I'm sorry.' It costs nothing and it saves a mint of pain. Those two words are the common coin of daily life, but especially between people who love each other. -- Pearl S. Buck
Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us. -- Pearl S. Buck
I am not given to superstition, yet there are certain places in old Asian countries where human beings have been born and have lived and died for so many generations that the very earth is saturated with their flesh and the air seems crowded with their continuing presence. -- Pearl S. Buck
You cannot be happy until you understand that life is sad -- Pearl S. Buck
Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge. -- Pearl S. Buck
An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls - even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls - without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.
(America's Medieval Women, Harper's Magazine, August 1938) -- Pearl S. Buck
Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him. -- Pearl S. Buck
The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon. -- Pearl S. Buck
A favorite means of escaping the solution to any problem is to declare it too complex for solution. This absolves us from attempting solution ... Any problem is too complex to solve when we do not wish to accept the conditions of solution. Solution is possible where acceptance is ready. -- Pearl S. Buck
He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house. -- Pearl S. Buck
It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe. -- Pearl S. Buck
When we define democracy now it must still be as a thing hoped for but not seen. -- 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
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
And out of his heaviness there stood out strangely but one clear thought and it was a pain to him, and it was this, that he wished he had not taken the two pearls from O-lan that day when she was washing his clothes at the pool, and he would never bear to see Lotus put them in her ears again. -- Pearl S. Buck
demands the utmost in wisdom, in attack, in endurance. Violence is simple and easy, it is the sword of the stupid and dull-witted, and it always leaves chaos. To carry on a positive revolution without violence - ah, that is a challenge to intelligence! -- Pearl S. Buck
Be proud of your child, accept him as he is and do not heed the words and stares of those who know no better. This child has a meaning for you and for all children. You will find a joy you cannot now suspect in fulfilling his life for and with him. -- Pearl S. Buck
There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream
whatever that dream might be. -- 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
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
It is the highest reward when a writer hears when a book written in doubt and solitude, has reached a human heart with a deeper meaning than even the writer had been aware of, as she wrote. It is something extra, the unexpected return. -- Pearl S. Buck
The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority. -- Pearl S. Buck
Attachment," Buddha had said, "is the cause of grief. -- Pearl S. Buck
When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly thereafter. -- Pearl S. Buck
When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place. -- Pearl S. Buck
Love changes," she replied. "When the flame dies, the glow remains, but it no longer centers upon one human creature and it warms the whole soul. Then the soul looks at all human creatures with love diffused. -- Pearl S. Buck
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness. -- 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
He could have been lonely except that he was never lonely, since he had always been alone. -- 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
The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is better not to say "lend." There is only giving. -- Pearl S. Buck
Life is the wonder with which we are all infused. -- Pearl S. Buck
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible
and achieve it, generation after generation. -- Pearl S. Buck
I reminded myself that time takes care of many things. Asia had thought me that. -- Pearl S. Buck
Leah was more than beautiful. She was filled with some spirit, a high quality, which Peony admired and did not understand. The Chinese said of her, "She is heaven-good." They meant that her goodness was natural and that it flowed from a fountain within herself. -- Pearl S. Buck
And roots, if they are to bear fruits, must be kept well in the soil of the land. -- Pearl S. Buck
Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes. -- 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
Only very coarse persons wanted wars. -- Pearl S. Buck
Wandering is never waste, dear boy,' he said. 'While you wander you will find much to wonder about, and wonder is the first step to creation. -- Pearl S. Buck
All that had been was now no more. -- Pearl S. Buck
Well, and you may have lived in the courts of the Old Lord, and you were accounted beautiful, but I have been a man's wife and I have borne him sons, and you are still a slave. -- Pearl S. Buck
All things are possible until they are proven impossible. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is easy to destroy but hard to create. Remember that, when you want to destroy something." The -- Pearl S. Buck
It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times. -- Pearl S. Buck
Love alone could waken love. -- Pearl S. Buck
And as for equality, are the fingers on one hand equal in length? Each has its place. -- Pearl S. Buck
In this unbelievable universe in which we live, there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder. -- Pearl S. Buck
The children are waiting for us," she said. Those were her words, but what she really said was that I must live and begin now to live. Death must not interrupt life. There were others waiting for us. -- Pearl S. Buck
Once the 'what' is decided, the 'how' always follows. We must not make the 'how' an excuse for not facing and accepting the 'what.' -- Pearl S. Buck
Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds. -- Pearl S. Buck
Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother's Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority. -- Pearl S. Buck
You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings. -- Pearl S. Buck
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. -- Pearl S. Buck
Though some men did not make war as others did, if they sold their goods for profit to the war-makers, did it make them better because the weapon was not in their own hands, if they had made the weapon and sold it and so put it into the hands of those used it upon the innocent? -- Pearl S. Buck
This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him. -- 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
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
Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmitted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness. -- Pearl S. Buck
What seems new is only new to us. -- Pearl S. Buck
However impatient she might be in the day, however filled with little sudden angers, at night she was all tenderness. -- Pearl S. Buck
Nothing is menial where there is love. -- Pearl S. Buck
But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him? -- Pearl S. Buck
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels. -- Pearl S. Buck
Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored - it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on. -- Pearl S. Buck
and his voice came from him in a whisper, -- Pearl S. Buck
As for inhibitions, I've spent a lifetime developing them, and I don't intend to lose them. -- Pearl S. Buck
Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity. -- Pearl S. Buck
No daughter is ever her mother's darling. That spot is always reserved for the son. -- Pearl S. Buck
Nations, like individuals, can only learn by their own individual experience." Yul-chun -- 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
I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. -- Pearl S. Buck
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. -- Pearl S. Buck
There will never cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food. -- 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
To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind. -- Pearl S. Buck
wept, and in the wrinkles of old people. In the house of the Manchu Bannerman, -- Pearl S. Buck
if one can surmount poverty and can love in moderation, there is no obstacle to happiness for anyone. -- Pearl S. Buck
Music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful. -- Pearl S. Buck
For no country is a true democracy whose women have not an equal share in life with men, and until we realize this we shall never achieve a real democracy on this earth. -- 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
Vermont is a country unto itself. -- Pearl S. Buck
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. -- Pearl S. Buck
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. -- 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
You are an artist," she said. "But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art. -- Pearl S. Buck
The highest civilizations
the longest to last and I believe the most successful in human terms
are those which have come the closest to achieving real understanding and mutual appreciation between men and women. -- Pearl S. Buck
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. -- Pearl S. Buck
Men cannot be free in a nation where women are forbidden freedom. -- Pearl S. Buck
Only the brave should teach ... Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach. -- Pearl S. Buck
There was no need to hurry that future - yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what? -- Pearl S. Buck
It was Wang Lung's marriage day. -- Pearl S. Buck
When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail. -- Pearl S. Buck
For Nature is not unjust. She does not steal into the womb and like an evil fairy give her good gifts secretly to men and deny them to women. Men and women are born free and equal in ability and brain. The injustice begins after birth. -- Pearl S. Buck
The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them. -- Pearl S. Buck
Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness. -- Pearl S. Buck
Fatalism is a false premise. What will be is not necessarily what must be ... -- Pearl S. Buck
It is ironical that in an age when we have prided ourselves on our progress in the intelligent care and teaching of children we have at the same time put them at the mercy of new and most terrible weapons of destruction. -- Pearl S. Buck
Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless. -- Pearl S. Buck
French is the most beautiful," he said, "and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other. -- Pearl S. Buck
If the belly is full," she said, "if we could know that it would always be full, men would be idle and laugh and play games like children, and then we would have peace and happiness. -- Pearl S. Buck
He was part of a whole, a people scattered over the earth and yet eternally one and indivisible. Wherever a Jew lived, in whatever safety and isolation, he still belonged to his people. -- Pearl S. Buck
To do good, to love justice, to grant that all men had an equal right to a pleasant life, these things Kung Chen believed in, and believing, he did all he could to perform his belief. -- Pearl S. Buck
For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home. -- Pearl S. Buck
Order is the shape upon which beauty depends. -- Pearl S. Buck
When one commits one's self to an airborne craft and the door is fastened against earth and home, there is no escape even by running away. The result is a strange sense of peace - desperate, perhaps, but peace. -- Pearl S. Buck
People on the whole are very simple-minded, in whatever country one finds them. They are so simple as to take literally, more often than no, the things their leaders tell them. -- Pearl S. Buck
None of us is so much better or wiser than any other than he can destroy a single creature without destroying something of himself." page 270 Pavilion of Women -- 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
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. -- Pearl S. Buck
Some mothers are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together -- Pearl S. Buck
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment. -- Pearl S. Buck
In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. -- Pearl S. Buck
The proper place to eat lobster ... is in a lobster shack as close to the sea as possible. There is no menu card because there is nothing else to eat except boiled lobster with melted butter. -- 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
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. -- Pearl S. Buck
Hunger makes thief of any man. -- Pearl S. Buck
To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death. -- Pearl S. Buck
We can't stop time, but it will sometimes stand still for love. -- Pearl S. Buck
Our bodies can be mobilized by law and police and men with guns, if necessary-but where shall we find that which will make us believe in what we must do, so that we can fight through to victory? -- Pearl S. Buck
There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are. -- Pearl S. Buck
Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction. -- Pearl S. Buck
Old One," the tenant said apologetically. "It is none of my business and I ought to die, but after all they are the children of your elder brother's son who after all is the first in the next generation after you. -- 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
Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless.
She knew she was immortal. -- Pearl S. Buck
A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated - and turned out to grass. -- Pearl S. Buck
I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody. -- Pearl S. Buck
Hunger makes a thief of any man. -- Pearl S. Buck
Can one spit on a smiling face?" he inquired; or he said, "Vengeance cannot last a night's sleep. -- Pearl S. Buck
Men of action," whose minds are too busy with the day's work to see beyond it. They are essential men, we cannot do without them, and yet we must not allow all our vision to be bound by the limitations of "men of action. -- Pearl S. Buck
People everywhere do not concern themselves much beyond the common round of everyday, and this is the chief problem for a democratic government, whose success depends upon an informed and responsible citizenry. -- Pearl S. Buck
Upon the profound discontent of the young in every country do I set my faith. I beg you, the young, to be discontented. I pray that you may rebel against what is wrong, not with feeble negative complaining but with strong positive assertion of what is right for all humanity. -- Pearl S. Buck
We are compelled to choose," he sometimes complained, "between the savagery of Communism and the vulgarism of America. -- Pearl S. Buck
Body and soul are partners, and neither must desert the other. -- Pearl S. Buck
You cannot be happy unless you understand that life is sad. -- Pearl S. Buck
Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance. -- Pearl S. Buck
There's two kinds of folk in the world, just like there's two kinds of life in a seed. Something sends one kind up to hunt its food in the light and air, and sends the other kind down into the earth to make the roots. -- 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
The superior man leads not by violence or by coarse physical acts but by the pure intelligence of a wise mind. -- 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
We must have this rule, for there are those whose hearts are so hard that they will come and buy this rice that is given for the poor--for a penny will not feed any man like this--and they will carry the rice home to feed to their pigs for slop. And the rice is for men and not for pigs" (Buck, 105). -- Pearl S. Buck
But no, it was not the small single moment which had killed him. It was the anger of all his life here in this house which he himself had built and lived in and hated all his years. -- Pearl S. Buck
I am never better pleased than when I know a book of mine can be bought for fifty cents or, better still, for twenty-five. No people can be educated or even cultivated until books are cheap enough for everybody to buy. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is easy to overthrow a government but very difficult to build a new one ... -- 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
Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself -- Pearl S. Buck
It is not poverty that is to be heared, but the lack of balance between riches and poverty. -- Pearl S. Buck
The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it. -- 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
This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night. -- Pearl S. Buck
What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born. -- Pearl S. Buck
My first vivid memory is ... when first I looked into her face and she looked into mine. That I do remember, and that exchanging looks I have carried with me all of my life. We recognized each other. I was her child and she was my mother. -- Pearl S. Buck
thing and it could be sold for a heap of silver and sometimes -- Pearl S. Buck
I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it. -- Pearl S. Buck
But I am fearful of it because I hear she is learned in the Four Books, and learning has never accompanied beauty in women. -- Pearl S. Buck
A hungry man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food. -- Pearl S. Buck
She had always been too wise to tell him all she thought and felt, knowing by some intuition of her own womanhood that no man wants to know everything of any woman. -- 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
I do not believe there is any important difference between men and women - certainly not as much as they may be between one woman and another or one man and another. -- Pearl S. Buck
To hate another human being is to take a worm into one's own vitals. It consumes life. -- Pearl S. Buck
All in all, Vermont is a jewel state, small but precious. -- Pearl S. Buck
A woman's mind is not an instrument apart from her other being. She does not separate herself as man does, now flesh, now mind, now heart. She is there as one, a unity complete and unified. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation, as colored Americans are living inside America. A nation cannot live confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its own citizens. -- Pearl S. Buck
I don't wait for moods - you'd never get anything done if you did. -- Pearl S. Buck
In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write. -- 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
Can such stiff and formal moldings as words capture the spirit-essence of love? -- Pearl S. Buck
Our children ... are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children for too long, their world separate from the real world of life. -- 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
I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us. -- Pearl S. Buck
Nature knows no sex limitations and does not bestow brains upon men alone. Daughters inherit gifts exactly as often and as much as sons. -- Pearl S. Buck
The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it. -- Pearl S. Buck
If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works, and we do not, as some do, sit idling over a gambling table or gossiping on doorsteps never swept, letting the fields grow to weeds and our children go half-fed!" (Buck, 65) -- Pearl S. Buck
The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband's bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool. -- Pearl S. Buck
Destructiveness comes only when life isn't lived. People who can live their lives don't destroy themselves. -- Pearl S. Buck
The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members -- Pearl S. Buck
At my age the bones are water in the morning until food is given them. -- Pearl S. Buck
Do not test the measure of his love for you by the way he expresses his body's heat. He is not thinking of you at those times. He is thinking of himself. -- Pearl S. Buck
The heart never grows old. -- Pearl S. Buck
I believe in the equality of man and woman," Rulan insisted.
"Ah," Madame Wu said, "two equals are nevertheless not the same two things. They are equal in importance, equally necessary to life, but not the same, -- Pearl S. Buck
We must save ourselves by doing what is godlike and we will become godlike. -- Pearl S. Buck
Doing and being are very closely tied together, and unless you are doing what you secretly want to do, you aren't able to be the sort of person you want to be. -- Pearl S. Buck
Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old. -- Pearl S. Buck
None on earth can love those who declare that they alone are the sons of God. -- Pearl S. Buck
If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death can take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid. -- 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
Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession. -- Pearl S. Buck
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. -- Pearl S. Buck
Food for all is a necessity. Food should not be a merchandise, to be bought and sold as jewels are bought and sold by those who have the money to buy. Food is a human necessity, like water and air, it should be available. -- Pearl S. Buck
I wish to produce the fruit of my brain for my country's good. A mere dog may fill the earth with the fruit of his body! -- Pearl S. Buck
What a man does in his own house cannot concern the nation. -- Pearl S. Buck
Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless. -- Pearl S. Buck
War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is natural anywhere that people like their own kind, but it is not necessarily natural that their fondness for their own kind should lead them to the subjection of whole groups of other people not like them. -- Pearl S. Buck
Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death. -- 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
Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought. -- Pearl S. Buck
At heart a truly modest man, he had nevertheless the modest man's pride in his modesty in the face of achievement. -- Pearl S. Buck
People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think. -- Pearl S. Buck
The truth has never been told about women in history: that everywhere man has gone woman has gone too, and what he has done she has done also. Women are ignorant of their own past and ignorant of their own importance in that past. -- Pearl S. Buck
Every mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied. -- Pearl S. Buck
The tears of the old come as easily as the tears of children, -- Pearl S. Buck
To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth. -- Pearl S. Buck
Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. -- Pearl S. Buck
The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals. -- Pearl S. Buck
Make love! He disliked the phrase. Could one make love? -- 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
Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control. -- Pearl S. Buck
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked. -- Pearl S. Buck
An artist is always seeking revelation. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is love itself that is important
the ability to love, no matter whom you love. For when you can no longer love anyone, you are no longer a living person. The heart dies if it loses the capacity to love. -- Pearl S. Buck
Iowans know themselves and what they are doing. They are doing well. -- 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
I do not believe in a child world. It is a fantasy world. I believe the child should be taught from the very first that the whole world is his world, that adult and child share one world, that all generations are needed. -- Pearl S. Buck
If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all. -- Pearl S. Buck
Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. -- Pearl S. Buck
Love dies only when growth stops. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is worse than folly ... not to recognize the truth, for in it lies the tinder for tomorrow. -- Pearl S. Buck
And looked sharply across the street. There was only one house -- Pearl S. Buck
Learn the good that you can of the foreign people and reject the unsuitable. -- Pearl S. Buck
What is the conscience? It is the most highly developed part of the human being, the core of the spirit, the most sensitive, the most tender. -- Pearl S. Buck
A person's heart withers if it does not answer another heart. -- Pearl S. Buck
Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame. -- Pearl S. Buck
Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure. -- Pearl S. Buck
On this earth, though far and near, without love, there's only fear. -- Pearl S. Buck
Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it. -- Pearl S. Buck
The feeling one has after coming to know American women is that they are starving at their sources. -- Pearl S. Buck
Believing in gods always causes confusion. -- Pearl S. Buck
The very young are not ready for much knowledge. It must be given to them slowly, in proportion to their years of life. One must first live before he can safely know. -- Pearl S. Buck
The narrator refers to a character as an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them. -- Pearl S. Buck
This is I. I am as you see me. I do not care to be otherwise. -- Pearl S. Buck
Why must this happen to me?" To this there could be no answer and there was none. When I knew at last that there could never be an answer, my own resolve shaped into the determination to make meaning out of the meaningless, and so provide the answer, though it was of my own making. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is the end of a family- when they begin to sell their land. Out of the land we came and into we must go - and if you will hold your land you can live- no one can rob you of land. -- Pearl S. Buck
When people work beyond their destiny, all they do fails. -- Pearl S. Buck
Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation. -- Pearl S. Buck
Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself. -- Pearl S. Buck
The body was so little a part of him that its final stillness seemed nothing of importance. He was half out of it anyway and death was only a slipping out of it altogether and being at last what he always was, a spirit. We buried the pearly shell upon the mountain top. -- Pearl S. Buck
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love. -- Pearl S. Buck
The community must assume responsibility for each child within its confines. Not one must be neglected whatever his condition. The community must see that every child gets the advantages and opportunities which are due him as a citizen and as a human being. -- Pearl S. Buck
Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. -- Pearl S. Buck
Starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times. -- Pearl S. Buck
Life is stronger than death. -- Pearl S. Buck
The melting-pot idea is futile ... The brew in a melting pot is always boiling over. -- 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
For generations fathers had watched earth and sea. -- Pearl S. Buck
He had other fires and these flamed higher than Love. -- Pearl S. Buck
Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation. -- Pearl S. Buck
It is not well for a man to know more than is necessary for his daily living. -- Pearl S. Buck
Peter groaned loudly. "Sonia Pan! She's ugly."
Mris. Liang would not yield. "Ugly girls can be fixed now. It is not like before. And she is very good. She does not waste money."
"It would be no use for her to waste money on herself," Louise murmured. -- Pearl S. Buck
there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The -- Pearl S. Buck
In a democracy such as ours the leading minds seldom achieve a place of permanent influence. And the men who sit in Congress or even in the White House are usually not our leading minds. They are not the thinkers. Still less have they time for reflection ... -- Pearl S. Buck
What the common man cannot understand he hates. -- Pearl S. Buck
All birth is unwilling. -- Pearl S. Buck
Times were chosen and appointed. If one forced them, they were wrong. -- Pearl S. Buck
One faces the future with one's past. -- Pearl S. Buck
There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses. -- Pearl S. Buck
God - if there is a God - would not choose one man above another or one people above another. -- Pearl S. Buck
Love must be taken on the tide, before it ebbs. -- Pearl S. Buck
The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change. -- Pearl S. Buck
A foreigner is a friend I have yet to meet. -- 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
In silence they lay close, without passion, but closer than passion could bring them they lay close. -- Pearl S. Buck
If life were known one moment ahead, how could it be endured? -- Pearl S. Buck
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up. -- Pearl S. Buck
The feet bear the burden of the body, the head the burden of the mind, and the heart the burden of the spirit. -- Pearl S. Buck
The rich are always afraid. -- Pearl S. Buck
The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between men and women. -- Pearl S. Buck
We must have hope or starve to death. -- Pearl S. Buck
Hope must come out of what we have, or it is not hope, but a dream. -- Pearl S. Buck
