Pearl S. Buck famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Monday #Joy

Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Love #Heaven

All things are possible until they are proved impossible - and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Peace #Anxiety #Feelings

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Love #Change #Anniversary

The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Inspiring #Civilization #Care

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Faith #Kindness #Angel

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

#Love #Loneliness #Inspiration

We must have hope or starve to death.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Hope #Having Hope

We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage and indeed perhaps more.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Joy #Sorrow #Illness

Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Mistake #Failure #Positive Thinking

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Motivational #Education #Time

Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Inspirational #Life #Truth

Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#People #Joy #Contentment

Love dies only when growth stops.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Love #Marriage #Growth

A person's heart withers if it does not answer another heart.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Heart #Answers #Doe

When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Men

Hunger makes a thief of any man.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Sad #Men #Poverty

When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Country #Peace #Struggle

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Single #Women #Spring

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

#Heart #Blame #Praise

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

#Children #Failure #Teaching

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." from Pavilion of Women page 292
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Light #Soul #Mind

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

#Beautiful #Powerful #Italian

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Time

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.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Blow #Creative #Joy

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Family #Mother #Children

Can such stiff and formal moldings as words capture the spirit-essence of love?
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Essence #Spirit #Formal

A hungry man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Men #Poverty #Hungry

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Inspirational #Beauty #Order

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#History #Needs #Feels

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Happiness #Growth #Germs

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Race #Evil #Diversity

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

#Happiness #Beautiful #Heart

Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Men #World #Should

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Change #Pain #Fear

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Life #Beautiful #Work

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Love #Family #Mom

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Success

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Country #New York #Cities

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Science #Technology #Yesterday

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Creative #Mind #Fields

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Lying #Book #Writing

One faces the future with one's past.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Time #Memories #Motivation

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Hope #Peace #Freedom

Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Home #Men #World

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

#Love #Broken Heart #Heartbreak

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

#Rights #Justice #Needs

There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Happiness #Hope #Joy

I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Nature #Earth #Assuming

None but the ignorant can be bored by life. To the lovers of learning, life is pure adventure shared with adventurers.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Life #Adventure #Bored

To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Teaching #Learning #Enjoy

But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Book #Care #Pages

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Hope #Peace #Bread

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

#Past #Men #History

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

#Ideas #Melting #United States

the heart never grows old.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Heart #Grows

Exclusion is always dangerous. Inclusion is the only safety if we are to have a peaceful world ...
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Safety #Peaceful #Unity

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

#Humility #Heart #Pride

Chinese were bornwith an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them.... 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

#Country #Philosophy #Philosophical

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 sinceI could never belong entirely to one side of any question.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Truth #People #Perception

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

#Men #People #Matter

starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#World #Unnecessary #Hunger

For Nature is not unjust. She does not steal into the womb and like an evil fairy give her good gifts secretly to men and deny them to women. Men and women are born free and equal in ability and brain. The injustice begins after birth.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Men #Evil #Giving

The concept of 'Momism' is male nonsense. It is the refuge of a man seeking excuses for his own lack of virility. I have listened to many women in various countries, and I have never found a woman who willingly 'mothers' her husband. The very idea is repulsive to her. She wants to mother the children while they are young, but never their fathers. True, she may be forced into the role of mother by a man's weaknesses and childishness, and then she accepts the role with dignity and patience, or with anger and impatience, but always with a secret, profound sadness unexpressed and inexpressible.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Mother #Country #Children

destructiveness comes only when life isn't lived. People who can live their lives don't destroy themselves.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#People

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

#Mother #Race #Profound

Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Children #Able #Way

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

#People #Landscape #Grows

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

#Country #Land #Air

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

#Kindness #Grateful #Long

the vicious result of privilege is that the creature who receives it becomes incapacitated by it as by a disease.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Disease #Privilege #Vicious

Life is the wonder with which we are all infused.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Wonder #Life Is

What the common man cannot understand he hates.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Hate #Men #Common

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

#Reflection #Men #White

No longer can we afford to stuff the brains of the young with facts. The time is too short, the necessity for results too pressing. The new education must be based on the elimination of facts except as they illustrate principles. How to use facts, not how to accumulate them, is the purpose of true education.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Education #Brain #Purpose

Prejudice ... is a subjective emotion which expresses itself upon others only because of an inner necessity for release. The object is irrelevant and opportune. The person who feels prejudice is the victim of himself and his own unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Life is not what he wants it to be and it has not been what he wishes it had been.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Wish #Prejudice #Want

When we define democracy now it must still be as a thing hoped for but not seen.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Democracy #Stills

For no country is a true democracy whose women have not an equal share in life with men, and until we realize this we shall never achieve a real democracy on this earth.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Country #Real #Men

Too many escape into complexity these days. For it is an escape for persons to cry, when this question of the equality of peoples is raised in India or in our own South, 'Ah, but the situation is not so simple.' ... no great stride forward is ever made for the individual or for the human race unless the complex situation is reduced to one simple question and its simple answer.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Simple #Race #Answers

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

#Children #Responsibility #Opportunity

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

#Children #Believe #Generations

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

#Wind #Civilization #Yield

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

#Education #Children #Teaching

endurance of inescapable sorrow is something which has to be learned alone. And only to endure is not enough. Endurance can be a harsh and bitter root in one's life, bearing poisonous and gloomy fruit, destroying other lives. Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance and the knowledge that sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Acceptance #Roots #Joy

An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at. He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can't risk anybody laughing at them.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Laughter #Thinking #Laughing

It is easy to overthrow a government but very difficult to build a new one ...
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Government #Easy #Difficult

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

#Eras #Renaissance #Earth

In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#World #Things Change #Geography

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

#Generations #Betrayed #Young

the proper place to eat lobster ... is in a lobster shack as close to the sea as possible. There is no menu card because there is nothing else to eat except boiled lobster with melted butter.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Food #Sea #Cards

When one commits one's self to an airborne craft and the door is fastened against earth and home, there is no escape even by running away. The result is a strange sense of peace - desperate, perhaps, but peace.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Running #Home #Doors

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

#Fate #Fatalism

nature knows no sex limitations and does not bestow brains upon men alone. Daughters inherit gifts exactly as often and as much as sons.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Daughter #Sex #Son

Our children ... are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children for too long, their world separate from the real world of life.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Children #Real #Long

I don't wait for moods - you'd never get anything done if you did.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Waiting #Done #Mood

Vermont is a country unto itself.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Country #Vermont

an artist is always seeking revelation.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Artist #Youth #Revelations

The only real danger to our country is from within, that we forget our own power to be what we want to be.
-- Pearl S. Buck

#Country #Real #Want

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

#Love Is #Blessing #Alive