Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

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.

There is no beauty without order.

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.

War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.

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

The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.

There was an old abbot in one temple and he said something of which I think often and it was this, that when men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Fear alone makes man weak. If you are afraid, your hands tremble, your feet falter, and your brain cannot tell hands and feet what to do.

And to him war was a thing like earth and sky and water and why it was no one knew but only that it was.

The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.

To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)

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

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.

All things are possible until they are proven impossible.

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

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

There was no need to hurry that future—yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?

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

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

The narrator refers to a character as "an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.

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.

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.

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

Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.

Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.

This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to earth.

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.

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

When hope is taken away from the people moral degeneration follows swiftly after.

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

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

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

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