Pearl S. Buck Quotes

He was part of a whole, a people scattered over the earth and yet eternally one and indivisible. Wherever a Jew lived, in whatever safety and isolation, he still belonged to his people.

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

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.

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

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

On this earth, though far and near, without love, there's only fear.

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.

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.

though some men did not make war as others did, if they sold their goods for profit to the war-makers, did it make them better because the weapon was not in their own hands, if they had made the weapon and sold it and so put it into the hands of those used it upon the innocent?

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

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.

It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.

an artist is always seeking revelation.

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.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

I do not believe there is any important difference between men and women - certainly not as much as they may be between one woman and another or one man and another.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.

Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors.

God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness . He is not in the general. He is in the particular.

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

One faces the future with one's past.

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

People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

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

When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly thereafter.

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.

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.

What the common man cannot understand he hates.

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

Life is the wonder with which we are all infused.

All in all, Vermont is a jewel state, small but precious.

People on the whole are very simple-minded, in whatever country one finds them. They are so simple as to take literally, more often than no, the things their leaders tell them.

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

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

The body was so little a part of him that its final stillness seemed nothing of importance. He was half out of it anyway and death was only a slipping out of it altogether and being at last what he always was, a spirit. We buried the pearly shell upon the mountain top.

Most mothers kiss and scold together.

Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself

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.

It is easy to overthrow a government but very difficult to build a new one.

It is worse than folly... not to recognize the truth, for in it lies the tinder for tomorrow.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

The rich are always afraid.

there's two kinds of folk in the world, just like there's two kinds of life in a seed. Something sends one kind up to hunt its food in the light and air, and sends the other kind down into the earth to make the roots.

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.

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

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