Pearl S. Buck Quotes

182 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
I believe in human beings, but my faith is without sentimentality. I know that in environments of uncertainty, fear, and hunger, the human being is dwarfed and shaped without his being aware of it, just as the plant struggling under a stone does not know its own condition. Only when the stone is removed can it spring up freely into the light. But the power to spring up is inherent, and only death puts an end to it. I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

Pearl S. Buck
Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.

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, and it should be as available.

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
The years have taught me that nothing is less reliable than [machines]... 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
Starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times.

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
There was no fatherhood in him. He had to be viewed, to be considered, not as a father but as a man. His children were merely accidents which had befallen him.

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

Pearl S. Buck
In the midst of possible world war, of wholesale destruction, I find my only question this: are there enough people now who believe? Is there time enough left for the wise to act? It is a contest between ignorance and death, or wisdom and life. My faith in humanity stands firm.

Pearl S. Buck
Fatalism is a false premise. What will be is not necessarily what must be.

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

Pearl S. Buck
If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.

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.

Pearl S. Buck
It is better not to say lend. There is no lending in that house. There is only giving.

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
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

Pearl S. Buck
He knew now that the only way to interest the rich was to suggest more riches.

Pearl S. Buck