Pearl S. Buck Quotes

The gift he had been given was sometimes heavy to bear, the ability always to understand why the other person was as he was. Wounded, yes, but never angry, and there were times when he longed to feel fierce personal anger.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

"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)

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.

The greatest blow for freedom that was ever struck in the world's history, perhaps, was when Abraham Lincoln decided that the slaves of the South were to be free and he freed them. The South collapsed. The gentlemen who could spend their time fighting, sure of supplies from slave-tended lands, began to starve and go ragged. Their homes began to fall into ruin and their families to be hungry. Their morale was broken. The war was really won by the pen upon the paper which wrote these words, "are and henceforward shall be free."

Well, and you may have lived in the courts of the Old Lord, and you were accounted beautiful, but I have been a man's wife and I have borne him sons, and you are still a slave.

For the soul of man is born fresh in every child, and there is an age in every creature, unless he is debased too young, when for a time he sees clearly the difference between truth and falsehood, and hypocrisy infuriates him. He cannot forgive those who should be true and instead are liars. This fury, I believe, is the first cause for revolutions throughout history.

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.

It is sweet to be loved, but to be able to love is to possess the life force. I love you. Therefore I am strong. Whatever my age, I am sustained by my own power to love.

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

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?

And from that time on the boys were no longer called Elder and Younger, but they were given school names by the old teacher, and this old man, after inquiring into the occupation of their father, erected two names for the sons; for the elder, Nung En, and for the second Nung Wen, and the first word of each name signified one whose wealth is from the earth.

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.

I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it.

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.