Pearl S. Buck Quotes

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.

To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.

In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.

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

Exclusion is always dangerous. Inclusion is the only safety if we are to have a peaceful world.

All in all, Vermont is a jewel state, small but precious.

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

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

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

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

When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.

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

Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

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.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless.

Only the brave should teach....Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate a desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist, he must not teach.

I do not believe in a child world. It is a fantasy world. I believe the child should be taught from the very first that the whole world is his world, that adult and child share one world, that all generations are needed.

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.

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.

music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful.

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.

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

The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband's bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.

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

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

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 is one word that can be the guide for your life- it is the word reciprocity.

It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.

Most mothers kiss and scold together.

Fatalism is a false premise. What will be is not necessarily what must be.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.

A hungry man can't see right or wrong. He just sees food.

A person's heart withers if it does not answer another heart.

When one commits one's self to an airborne craft and the door is fastened against earth and home, there is no escape even by running away. The result is a strange sense of peace - desperate, perhaps, but peace.

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.

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

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.

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.

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

A foreigner is a friend I have yet to meet.

One faces the future with one's past.

On this earth, though far and near, without love, there's only fear.

What the common man cannot understand he hates.