Pearl S Buck Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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. 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.

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

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.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

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

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.

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

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

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.

All things are possible until they are proven impossible.

One faces the future with one's past.

The rich are always afraid.

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?

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

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

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.

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.

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

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.

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." (America's Medieval Women, Harper's Magazine, August 1938)

It is the end of a family- when they begin to sell their land. Out of the land we came and into we must go - and if you will hold your land you can live- no one can rob you of land.

You cannot be happy until you understand that life is sad

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

Hunger makes thief of any man.

Life is stronger than death.

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

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.

Nothing is menial where there is love.

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

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.

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

God—if there is a God—would not choose one man above another or one people above another.

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

French is the most beautiful,” he said, “and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other.

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.

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

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

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

Happiness was waiting to be chosen.

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

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

If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born myself...a human being.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

You are right,” he had said. “Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, ‘Know thy neighbor as thyself.” That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love.

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.

No se puede parar el tiempo, pero para el amor a veces se detiene

To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think.

We can't stop time, but it will sometimes stand still for love.

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.

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

Well, and they must all starve if the plants starve." 'It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth' (Buck, 71).

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.

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.

I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being

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

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

But hers was a strange heart, sad in its very nature, and she could never weep and ease it as other women do, for her tears never brought her comfort.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that's where I renew my springs that never dry up. ~Pearl Buck

Well I know I am ugly and cannot be loved—

Do not test the measure of his love for you by the way he expresses his body's heat. He is not thinking of you at those times. He is thinking of himself.

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.

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

Omul prost se teme de cel deștept și îl urăște. Oricât de bun ar fi cel deștept, trebuie să priceapă că asta nu va cuceri afecțiunea unuia cu mai puțină minte decât el.

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.

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

If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works, and we do not, as some do, sit idling over a gambling table or gossiping on doorsteps never swept, letting the fields grow to weeds and our children go half-fed!" (Buck, 65)

It was Wang Lung's marriage day.

Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless. She knew she was immortal.

This is I. I am as you see me. I do not care to be otherwise.

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

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

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

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.

You are free when you gain back yourself,” Madame Wu said. “You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.

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.

And out of his heaviness there stood out strangely but one clear thought and it was a pain to him, and it was this, that he wished he had not taken the two pearls from O-lan that day when she was washing his clothes at the pool, and he would never bear to see Lotus put them in her ears again.

Out of the woman's great brown breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at the one breast it flowed like a fountain from the other, ans she let it flow. There was more than enough for the child, greedy though he was, life enough for many children, and she let it flow out carelessly, conscious of her abundance. There was always more. Sometimes she lifted her breast and let it flow out upon the ground to save her clothing, and it sank into the earth and made a soft, dark, rich spot in the field. The child fat and good-natured and ate of the inexhaustible life his mother gave him.

You must set forth and find the center of your interest. You are a creator, but you must find your interest and then dedicate yourself to that interest—not to the act of creativity. Merely to want to create will make it impossible for you to do so. You must find an interest greater than yourself—a love, perhaps—and then the power to create will set you on fire.

Just as he lived with them alive, he will live with them dead. Someday he will accept their death as part of his life. He will weep no more. He will carry them in his memory and his thoughts. His flesh and blood are part of them. So long as he is alive, they, too, will live in him. The big wave came, but it went away. The sun shines again, birds sing, and earth flowers.

Now it has been said from ancient times that all women who weep may be divided into three sorts. There are those who lift up their voices and their tears flow and this may be called crying; there are those who utter loud lamentations but whose tears do not flow and this may be called howling; there are those whose tears flow but who utter no sound and this may be called weeping. Of all those women who followed Wang Lung in his coffin, his wives and his sons’ wives and his maid servants and his slaves and his hired mourners, there was only one who wept and it was Pear Blossom.

Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from the earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But not for the first time, such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than life itself - clothes upon the body of his son.

Yet there were times when he did love her with all the kindness she demanded, and how was she to know what were those times? Alone she raged against his cheerfulness and put herself at the mercy of her own love and longed to be free of it because it made her less than he and dependent on him. But how could she be free of chains she had put upon herself? Her soul was all tempest. The dreams she had once had of her life were dead. She was in prison in the house. And yet who was her jailer except herself?

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.

Then Wang Lung turned to the woman and looked at her for the first time. She had a square, honest face, a short, broad nose with large black nostrils, and her mouth was wide as a gash in her face. Her eyes were small and of a dull black in color, and were filled with some sadness that was not clearly expressed. It was a face that seemed habitually silent and unspeaking, as though it could not speak if it would. She bore patiently Wang Lung’s look, without embarrassment or response, simply waiting until he had seen her. He saw that it was true there was not beauty of any kind in her face—a brown, common, patient face. But there were no pock-marks on her dark skin, nor was her lip split. In her ears he saw his rings hanging, the gold-washed rings he had bought, and on her hands were the rings he had given her. He turned away with secret exultation. Well, he had his woman!