Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.

He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he was dead, since his head drooped upon his shoulder and his eyes were closed above his bearded lips. Wang Lung looked at the pictured man in horror and with increasing interest.

Vermont is a country unto itself.

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

Once the 'what' is decided, the 'how' always follows. We must not make the 'how' an excuse for not facing and accepting the 'what.'

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

Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure.

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

At my age the bones are water in the morning until food is given them.

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

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.

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.

Only very coarse persons wanted wars.

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.

No daughter is ever her mother's darling. That spot is always reserved for the son.

It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death can take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid.

If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born myself...a human being.

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.

I am mentally bifocal.

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

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.

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

Love dies only when growth stops.

In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.

It is better not to say "lend." There is only giving.

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

The highest civilizations -- the longest to last and I believe the most successful in human terms -- are those which have come the closest to achieving real understanding and mutual appreciation between men and women.

there is one word that can be the guide for your life- it is the word reciprocity.

Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.

To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium.

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

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

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

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.

For war to man, like childbirth to women, is simplifying in its emotions and activities. All the real problems of life can be put aside while the one thing is done and little thought is needed to do it. ... His hatreds can be expressed without censure, he can let his emotions run free, he can behave as dramatically, as heroically as he likes, and no one laughs at him. It is almost impossible for a man to behave heroically in the cool and ordinary times of peace. But in war anything is allowed him, he is praised and applauded and made much of, as women are excused and allowed for in pregnancy.

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.

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

We must have hope or starve to death.

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

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

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.

The feeling one has after coming to know American women is that they are starving at their sources.

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

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.

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.

Integrity is honesty carried through the fibres of the being and the whole mind, into thought as well as action so that the person is complete in honesty. That kind of integrity I put above all else as an essential to leadership.