Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

Attachment," Buddha had said, "is the cause of grief.

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.

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

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

I am never better pleased than when I know a book of mine can be bought for fifty cents or, better still, for twenty-five. No people can be educated or even cultivated until books are cheap enough for everybody to buy.

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.

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

His problem was the eternal question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist - the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release.

Wandering is never waste, dear boy,' he said. 'While you wander you will find much to wonder about, and wonder is the first step to creation.

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

If a superior man undertakes something and tried to lead,
He goes astray.
But if he follows, he finds guidance.
It is favourable to find friends in the West and South,
and quiet perseverance brings good fortune.

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 ...

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.

There will never cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food.

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

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.

Life is the wonder with which we are all infused.

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.

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.

There is no beauty without order.

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.

But I am fearful of it because I hear she is learned in the Four Books, and learning has never accompanied beauty in women.

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

If life were known one moment ahead, how could it be endured?

What the common man cannot understand he hates.

It is the highest reward when a writer hears when a book written in doubt and solitude, has reached a human heart with a deeper meaning than even the writer had been aware of, as she wrote. It is something extra, the unexpected return.

I wish to produce the fruit of my brain for my country's good. A mere dog may fill the earth with the fruit of his body!

All scientific effort must now be concentrated in the area of defence (sic). We have learned our lesson. We, the most civilized of people, have been misled by our own sages through the last four thousand years. We are now over-civilized in a world of barbaric peoples. WE were taught centuries ago that war is not the pastime of a civilized people. We stopped the development of explosive weapons a thousand years ago, on the ground that it was inhuman and monstrous to kill innocent people. Let warriors fight with broadswords and kill each other, we said, but others who are innocent must not die by accident. Therefore, though we understood the principles of rocketry, we did not allow it to be used. Even gunpowder was used only in fireworks. We felt secure in our place under heaven, the centre of a protective ring of subject peoples, beyond whose borders we did not penetrate. Who could have imagined that those outer barbarians would themselves develop atomic bombs and rocket weapons and all manner of deadly chemicals?

The feet bear the burden of the body, the head the burden of the mind, and the heart the burden of the spirit.

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.

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

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

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.

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 rich are always afraid.

The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.

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

I do not blame you, child, for growing up," she announced. "But I teach you this: Whatever happens is always the woman's fault.

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

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.

And looked sharply across the street. There was only one house

if one can surmount poverty and can love in moderation, there is no obstacle to happiness for anyone.

It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation, as colored Americans are living inside America. A nation cannot live confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its own citizens.

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

Andre had been telling her an ancient legend of the fall of man into evil. It came about, he said, by the hand of a woman, Eve, who gave man forbidden fruit.
"And how was this woman to know that the fruit was forbidden?" Madame Wu had inquired.
"An evil spirit, in the shape of a serpent, whispered it to her," Andre had said.
"Why to her instead of to the man?" she had inquired.
"Because he knew that her mind and her heart were fixed not upon the man, but upon the pursuance of life," he had replied. "The man's mind and heart were fixed upon himself. He was happy enough, dreaming that he possessed the woman and the garden. Why should he be tempted further? He had all. But the woman could always be tempted by the thought of a better garden, a larger space, more to possess, because she knew that out of her body would come many more beings, and for them she plotted and planned. The woman thought not of herself, but of the many whom she would create. For their sake she was tempted. For their sake she will always be tempted.

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

None of us is so much better or wiser than any other than he can destroy a single creature without destroying something of himself." page 270 Pavilion of Women

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

Be proud of your child, accept him as he is and do not heed the words and stares of those who know no better. This child has a meaning for you and for all children. You will find a joy you cannot now suspect in fulfilling his life for and with him.

If the belly is full," she said, "if we could know that it would always be full, men would be idle and laugh and play games like children, and then we would have peace and happiness.

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.

And roots, if they are to bear fruits, must be kept well in the soil of the land.

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.

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.

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

It was Wang Lung's marriage day.

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.

Love must be taken on the tide, before it ebbs.

demands the utmost in wisdom, in attack, in endurance. Violence is simple and easy, it is the sword of the stupid and dull-witted, and it always leaves chaos. To carry on a positive revolution without violence - ah, that is a challenge to intelligence!

I would ask my teacher a question," Yehonala said.
"Ask," Lady Miao replied. She was brushing fine quick strokes upon a large sheet of paper spread upon a square table which the eunuch had brought to her side.
"When may I paint a picture of my own?" Yehonala asked. Her teacher held her hand poised for an instant and cast a sidelong look from her narrowed eyes. "When I can no longer command you.

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 not poverty that is to be heared, but the lack of balance between riches and poverty.

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.

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

Believing in gods always causes confusion.

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.

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

Nothing is menial where there is love.

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

This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.

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.

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

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.

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

Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.

Americans are citizens from the moment they are born, and not when they become twenty-one years of age. By then, if they have not performed the acts of a citizen in a democracy, it is too late. They remain irresponsible and therefore immature. From the first grade on, the child should be taught his duties as a citizen, and given his voice in municipal matters and then in state and nation.

Hope must come out of what we have, or it is not hope, but a dream.

Liz, it's so easy to say 'I'm sorry.' It costs nothing and it saves a mint of pain. Those two words are the common coin of daily life, but especially between people who love each other.

To repay evil with kindness is the proof of a good man; a superior man blames himself, a common man blames others.

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.

To do good, to love justice, to grant that all men had an equal right to a pleasant life, these things Kung Chen believed in, and believing, he did all he could to perform his belief.

Is our Heaven your God, and is your God our Heaven?' she inquired.
'They are one and the same,' he replied ...
'There is only one true God. He has many names.'
'Then anywhere upon the round earth, by whatever seas, those who believe in any God believe in the One?' she asked.
'And so are brothers,' he said, agreeing.
'And if I do not believe in any?' she inquired willfully.
'God is patient,' he said. 'God waits. Is there not eternity?'
page 206 Pavilion of Women

Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmitted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

None on earth can love those who declare that they alone are the sons of God.

When foreigners come into a nation, the best way is to make them no longer foreign. That is to say, let us marry our young together and let there be children. War is costly, love is cheap.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

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.

Love changes," she replied. "When the flame dies, the glow remains, but it no longer centers upon one human creature and it warms the whole soul. Then the soul looks at all human creatures with love diffused.

In silence they lay close, without passion, but closer than passion could bring them they lay close.

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.

You cannot be happy until you understand that life is sad

The best thing in the world for each of us is that which we can best do, because it gives us the feeling of being useful. That's happiness.

There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.

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

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

I reminded myself that time takes care of many things. Asia had thought me that.

All things are possible until they are proven impossible.