Pearl S. Buck Quotes

182 Sourced Quotes

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
I love people. I love my family, my children … but 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
To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy, a whole heart, and a free mind.

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
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
Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

Pearl S. Buck
It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid.

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
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
Kansas, in sum, is one of our finest states and lives a sane, peaceful, and prosperous life.

Pearl S. Buck
No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language was mathematics.

Pearl S. Buck
When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly after.

Pearl S. Buck
It is a shameful sign of our arrogance that our history departments have almost no Chinese history in them, our literature courses almost no Chinese literature, our philosophy departments almost none of the great Chinese systems of philosophy. And our religious schools have been the most arrogant of all.
This ignorant arrogant mind has become fixed in its patterns. It is the pattern which considers anything not American to be inferior — unless it be English.

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

Pearl S. Buck
There was no end to a road once he had set his feet upon it.

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
The people of China forged their own literature apart from letters. And today this is what lives, to be part of what is to come, and all the formal literature, which was called art, is dead. The plots of these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is often not brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes it merely stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when death is not expected.
In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a writer.

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

Pearl S. Buck
She doesn't try to improve us. She makes us want to improve ourselves. It's quite different.

Pearl S. Buck
All things are possible until they are proved impossible — and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.

Pearl S. Buck
Nobody listened to a man who had spent his life on one idea.

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
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
Ah well, perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked.

Pearl S. Buck