Pearl S. Buck Quotes

Love dies only when growth stops.

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.

men cannot be free in a nation where women are forbidden freedom.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

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

We must have hope or starve to death.

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.

Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.

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.

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

an artist is always seeking revelation.

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

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.

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

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

Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

Vermont is a country unto itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Life is stronger than death.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

the heart never grows old.

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.

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

Love alone could waken love.

Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.

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.

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.