Pearl S. Buck Quotes

When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there.

I learned to distinguish between the two kinds of people in the world: those who have known inescapable sorrow and those who have not.

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

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

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

doing and being are very closely tied together, and unless you are doing what you secretly want to do, you aren't able to be the sort of person you want to be.

The greatest problem that war leaves, in a man, is how to recapture reality. That's because war is unreal.

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.

Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

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

I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody.

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

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.

... [I]n any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until some day inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle.

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

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.

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.

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.

Food for all is a necessity. Food should not be a merchandise, to be bought and sold as jewels are bought and sold by those who have the money to buy. Food is a human necessity, like water and air, it should be available.

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.

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.

There was an old abbot in one temple and he said something of which I think often and it was this, that when men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

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

The typhoon came out of the sea first as a deep hollow roar. ... I was surrounded by the madness, the unreason, of uncontrolled, undisciplined energy. None of this made any sense. It was worse than useless - it was nature destroying its own creation - its own self. To create by the long process of growth and then to destroy by a fit of wild emotion - was this not madness, was this not unreason?

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

There is no beauty without order.

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.

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.

As for inhibitions, I've spent a lifetime developing them, and I don't intend to lose them.

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

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

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.

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

Nothing is menial where there is love.

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

It is love itself that is important -- the ability to love, no matter whom you love. For when you can no longer love anyone, you are no longer a living person. The heart dies if it loses the capacity to love.

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

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

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.

She had always been too wise to tell him all she thought and felt, knowing by some intuition of her own womanhood that no man wants to know everything of any woman.

From that house there has come so much life that it ought never to die or fall into ruin... For me that house was a gateway to America.

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.

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

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

What a man does in his own house cannot concern the nation.

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

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.

It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.