Pearl S. Buck Quotes

182 Sourced Quotes

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
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
It is natural anywhere that people like their own kind, but it is not necessarily natural that their fondness for their own kind should lead them to the subjection of whole groups of other people not like them.

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

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

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

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

Pearl S. Buck
To him, as to all old, there came gradually the knowledge that there were not many more days in which to work, not many nights left in which to lie down to sleep, and there would soon be a dawn to which he would not wake.

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
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
It is ironical that in an age when we have prided ourselves on our progress in the intelligent care and teaching of children we have at the same time put them at the mercy of new and most terrible weapons of destruction.

Pearl S. Buck
For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.

Pearl S. Buck
I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.

Pearl S. Buck
Did one man write Shui Hu Chuan, or did it grow to its present shape, added to, rearranged, deepened and developed by many minds and many a hand, in different centuries? Who can now tell? They are dead. They lived in their day and wrote what in their day they saw and heard, but of themselves they have told nothing.

Pearl S. Buck
No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

Pearl S. Buck
The typhoon came out of the sea first as a deep hollow roar.... I was surrounded by the madness, the unreason, of uncontrolled, undisciplined energy. None of this made any sense. It was worse than useless - it was nature destroying its own creation - its own self. To create by the long process of growth and then to destroy by a fit of wild emotion - was this not madness, was this not unreason?

Pearl S. Buck
Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction.

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