Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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.

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

The rich are always afraid.

The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.

Once the 'what' is decided, the 'how' always follows. We must not make the 'how' an excuse for not facing and accepting the 'what.'

It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death can take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid.

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

It is better not to say "lend." There is only giving.

the vicious result of privilege is that the creature who receives it becomes incapacitated by it as by a disease.

All birth is unwilling.

Life is the wonder with which we are all infused.

starvation is a shame and disgrace to the world and totally unnecessary in modern times.

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.

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.

No daughter is ever her mother's darling. That spot is always reserved for the son.

Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure.

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

The only real danger to our country is from within, that we forget our own power to be what we want to be.

There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses.

Iowans know themselves and what they are doing. They are doing well.

What seems new is only new to us.

Only very coarse persons wanted wars.

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

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.

When we define democracy now it must still be as a thing hoped for but not seen.

It certainly must have been a relief for women of the country to realize that one could be a woman and a lady and yet be thoroughly political.

The feeling one has after coming to know American women is that they are starving at their sources.

when the people of any country choose peace at all costs, not even generals can make war.

Science and religion, religion and science, put it as it may, they are the two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two focus together, reveal the truth.

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.

Nothing is menial where there is love.

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

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

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

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

The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon.

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.

When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly thereafter.

I am mentally bifocal.

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.

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.

To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium.

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

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

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.

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.

Believing in gods always causes confusion.

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

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.

It is easy to overthrow a government but very difficult to build a new one.