Top 15 Pearl S. Buck Quotes

Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

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. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream — whatever that dream might be.

To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

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

- Wang Lung

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

The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members

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