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
He's like those lawyer fellows — he wants laws as clubs, see? Clubs to make the other fellow do what you want! But my idea is to use laws to keep my freedom to do what I want.

Pearl S. Buck
It is love itself that is important — the ability to love, no matter whom you love. For when you can no longer love anyone, you are no longer a living person. The heart dies if it loses the capacity to love.

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
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