Pearl S. Buck Quotes

182 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
When the people of any country choose peace at all costs, not even generals can make war.

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
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
Chinese were born, it seemed to me, with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naiveté, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them. To talk even with a farmer and his family, none of whom could read or write, was often to hear a philosophy at once sane and humorous. If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.

Pearl S. Buck
The basic discovery about any people, therefore, is the discovery of the relationship between its men and women.

Pearl S. Buck
The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering... and I was reaping what I had not sown... None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do. We had not, I think, ever committed even a mild unkindness against a Chinese, and certainly we had devoted ourselves to justice for them, we had taken sides against our own race again and again for their sakes, sensitive always to injustices which others had committed and were still committing. But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.

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 not, the things their leaders tell them.

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

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
But he had ceased already to value what he had, so immense was his desire for what was yet to come.

Pearl S. Buck
Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Pearl S. Buck
Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break.

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

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
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
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
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
There will not cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food.

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
In this unbelievable universe in which we live, there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder.

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
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