Pearl S. Buck - Mind Quotes

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The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Pearl S. Buck
To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy, a whole heart, and a free mind.

Pearl S. Buck
'Men of action,' whose minds are too busy with the day's work to see beyond it... are essential men, we cannot do without them, and yet we must not allow all our vision to be bound by the limitations of 'men of action.'

Pearl S. Buck
She did not mind sitting and watching him while he slept. They were so close, so nearly one, that his sleep seemed to rest her, too.

Pearl S. Buck
Out of this folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with thousands of years of life, grew, literally, the Chinese novel. For these novels changed as they grew. If, as I have said, there are no single names attached beyond question to the great novels of China, it is because no one hand wrote them. From beginning as a mere tale, a story grew through succeeding versions, into a structure built by many hands.

Pearl S. Buck
It is a shameful sign of our arrogance that our history departments have almost no Chinese history in them, our literature courses almost no Chinese literature, our philosophy departments almost none of the great Chinese systems of philosophy. And our religious schools have been the most arrogant of all.
This ignorant arrogant mind has become fixed in its patterns. It is the pattern which considers anything not American to be inferior — unless it be English.

Pearl S. Buck
The Chinese novel was written primarily to amuse the common people. And when I say amuse I do not mean only to make them laugh, though laughter is also one of the aims of the Chinese novel. I mean amusement in the sense of absorbing and occupying the whole attention of the mind. I mean enlightening that mind by pictures of life and what that life means.

Pearl S. Buck
The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change.

Pearl S. Buck
In a democracy such as ours the leading minds seldom achieve a place of permanent influence. And the men who sit in Congress or even in the White House are usually not our leading minds. They are not the thinkers. Still less have they time for reflection.

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

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