Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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?

The street is noisy and the men and women are not perfect in the technique of their expression as the statues are. They are ugly and imperfect, incomplete even as human beings, and where they come from and where they go cannot be known. But they are people and therefore infinitely to be preferred to those who stand upon the pedestals of art.

We can't stop time, but it will sometimes stand still for love.

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.

I reminded myself that time takes care of many things. Asia had thought me that.

If life were known one moment ahead, how could it be endured?

In silence they lay close, without passion, but closer than passion could bring them they lay close.

The feet bear the burden of the body, the head the burden of the mind, and the heart the burden of the spirit.

You must set forth and find the center of your interest. You are a creator, but you must find your interest and then dedicate yourself to that interest — not to the act of creativity. Merely to want to create will make it impossible for you to do so. You must find an interest greater than yourself — a love, perhaps — and then the power to create will set you on fire.

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

Life is stronger than death.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.

Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever.

Just as he lived with them alive, he will live with them dead. Someday he will accept their death as part of his life. He will weep no more. He will carry them in his memory and his thoughts. His flesh and blood are part of them. So long as he is alive, they, too, will live in him. The big wave came, but it went away. The sun shines again, birds sing, and earth flowers.