Pearl S. Buck Quotes

I believe with all my heart that jimcrow is wicked and I know that it is a rotten core in our society. I know that we cannot say that we are a full democracy so long as jimcrow exists anywhere in our country. I will fight against it and refuse to countenance it in all was that I can, as long as I live. And yet I know that were all jimcrow laws to be abolished tomorrow, the war for the lberation of mankind would still not be won here. There would still be those not free, not equal.

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

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.

And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted,and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked.

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

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."

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.

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.

Hunger makes thief of any man.

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.

Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.

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

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break.

Shri Guru Granth Sahib is a source book, an expression of man's loneliness, his aspiration, his longings, his cry to God and his hunger for communication with that being. I have studied the scriptures of other great religions, but I do not find elsewhere the same power of appeal to the heart and mind as I feel here in these volumes. They are compact in spite of their length, and are a revelation of the vast reach of the human heart varying from the most noble concept of God to the recognition and indeed the insistence upon the practical needs of the human body. There is something strangely modern about these scriptures and this puzzled me until I learnt that they are in fact comparatively modern, compiled as late as the sixteenth century, when explorers were beginning to discover the globe upon which we all live as a single entity divided only by arbitrary lines of our own making. Perhaps this sense of unity is a source of power I find in these volumes. They speak to persons of any religion or of none. They speak for the human heart and the searching mind...