Pearl S. Buck Quotes

182 Sourced Quotes

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

Pearl S. Buck
The common sense of people will surely prove to them someday that mutual support and cooperation are only sensible for the security and happiness of all. Such faith keeps me continually ready and purposeful with energy to do what one person can towards shaping the environment in which the human being can grow with freedom.

Pearl S. Buck
Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.

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
Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.

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

Pearl S. Buck
What a man does in his own house cannot concern the nation.

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
A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be above all else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable as to be wholly at the command of the material that flows through him. His whole duty is only to sort life as it flows through him, and in the vast fragmentariness of time and space and event to discover essential and inherent order and rhythm and shape. We should never be able, merely by reading pages, to know who wrote them, for when the style of a novelist becomes fixed, that style becomes his prison. The Chinese novelists varied their writing to accompany like music their chosen themes.

Pearl S. Buck
There were many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts being broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream—whatever the dream might be.

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

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
He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he was dead, since his head drooped upon his shoulder and his eyes were closed above his bearded lips. Wang Lung looked at the pictured man in horror and with increasing interest.

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
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
Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.

Pearl S. Buck
The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

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
Music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful.

Pearl S. Buck
I enjoy life because I am endlessly interested in people and their growth. My interest leads me to widen my knowledge of people, and this in turn compels me to believe in the common goodness of mankind. I believe that the normal human heart is born good. That is, it's born sensitive and feeling, eager to be approved and to approve, hungry for simple happiness and the chance to live. It neither wishes to be killed, nor to kill. If through circumstances, it is overcome by evil, it never becomes entirely evil. There remain in it elements of good, however recessive, which continue to hold the possibility of restoration.

Pearl S. Buck
The melting-pot idea is futile... The brew in a melting pot is always boiling over.

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

Pearl S. Buck