Pearl S. Buck Quotes

182 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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.

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

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

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
I became mentally bifocal, and so I learned early to understand that 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 damage such perception did to me I have felt ever since, although damage may be too dark a word, for it merely meant that I could never belong entirely to one side of any question. To be a Communist would be absurd to me, as absurd as to be entirely anything and equally impossible. I straddled the globe too young.

Pearl S. Buck
You are right, he had said. Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, '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. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love.

Pearl S. Buck
One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or to what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful.

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

Pearl S. Buck
Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control.

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

Pearl S. Buck
I know that the only completely happy life for man and for woman is their life, first together, and then with their children. I am a firm believer that no marriage can be really happy, and no home a happy one for the children as well, unless man puts woman first and woman puts man first, each for the other the giver of every good gift. Children are the fruit of this total love.

Pearl S. Buck