Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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.

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

Men of action," whose minds are too busy with the day's work to see beyond it. They 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.

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.

There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses.

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

Just about everything significant in my life happened after I passed forty. I was a housewife and mother, but yearned to be a writer. I worked at my writing whenever I could snatch a moment, and I assembled several manuscripts. I was just about forty when my first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published. Then a few months later came The Good Earth. My career was launched at last, and it has given me the richest possible satisfaction

War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.

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

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

To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future.

Upon the profound discontent of the young in every country do I set my faith. I beg you, the young, to be discontented. I pray that you may rebel against what is wrong, not with feeble negative complaining but with strong positive assertion of what is right for all humanity.

Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.

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

Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.

Believing in gods always causes confusion.

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

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.

A woman's mind is not an instrument apart from her other being. She does not separate herself as man does, now flesh, now mind, now heart. She is there as one, a unity complete and unified.

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.

Science and religion, religion and science, put it as it may, they are the two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two focus together, reveal the truth.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Our bodies can be mobilized by law and police and men with guns, if necessary-but where shall we find that which will make us believe in what we must do, so that we can fight through to victory?

A knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. Fate...is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.

Love alone could waken love.

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.

It certainly must have been a relief for women of the country to realize that one could be a woman and a lady and yet be thoroughly political.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.

when the people of any country choose peace at all costs, not even generals can make war.

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

Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung

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.

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.

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.

The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon.

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.

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.

My first vivid memory is...when first I looked into her face and she looked into mine. That I do remember, and that exchanging looks I have carried with me all of my life. We recognized each other. I was her child and she was my mother.

you seem to grieve for what is not so ... and there is no need to let your heart run ahead into evils that may never come.

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

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.

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.

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.