Pearl S. Buck quotes:

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

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

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

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

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

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.

A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

One faces the future with one's past.

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

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

Love dies only when growth stops.

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.

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

Believing in gods always causes confusion.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls-even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls-without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.

Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless.

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.

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

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

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

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.

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

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?

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.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

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?

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

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.

Chinese were bornwith an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them.... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

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.

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

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness

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

Love alone could waken love.

However impatient she might be in the day, however filled with little sudden angers, at night she was all tenderness.

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

Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

... [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.

...most mothers kiss and scold together.

A favorite means of escaping the solution to any problem is to declare it too complex for solution. This absolves us from attempting solution. ... Any problem is too complex to solve when we do not wish to accept the conditions of solution. Solution is possible where acceptance is ready.

A foreigner is a friend I have yet to meet.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

All birth is unwilling.

an artist is always seeking revelation.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am mentally bifocal.

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.

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.

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

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.