Pearl S. Buck Quotations

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.

Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it.

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.

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.

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

Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.

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

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

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

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 the way that it cares for its helpless members.

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

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

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.

The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.

Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.

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

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

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

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

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

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

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.

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband's bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.

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.

It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.

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.

A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated and turned out to grass.

We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.

When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place

Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.

Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.

Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

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

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

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.

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

men cannot be free in a nation where women are forbidden freedom.

The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members

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

Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.

To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

A hungry man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food.

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.

In this unbelievable universe in which we live, there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder.

It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation, as colored Americans are living inside America. A nation cannot live confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its own citizens.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

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.

A person's heart withers if it does not answer another heart.

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

One faces the future with one's past.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

Love dies only when growth stops.

We must have hope or starve to death.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

What the common man cannot understand he hates.

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

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.

Only the brave should teach....Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach.

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

It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times.

At heart a truly modest man, he had nevertheless the modest man's pride in his modesty in the face of achievement.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.