Pearl S. Buck quotes - page 2

Ah well, perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked. (Pearl S. Buck)
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.
Pearl S. Buck
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
Pearl S. Buck
If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.
Pearl S. Buck
To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.
Pearl S. Buck
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.
Pearl S. Buck
The rich are always afraid.
Pearl S. Buck
It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.
Pearl S. Buck
Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.
Pearl S. Buck
A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.
Pearl S. Buck
For 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 - to create - to create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of beauty and meaning his very breath is cut off from him. He must create. He must pour out creation. By some strange unknown pressing inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. (Pearl S. Buck)
To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
Pearl S. Buck
Hunger makes a thief of any man.
Pearl S. Buck
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.
Pearl S. Buck
Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.
Pearl S. Buck
When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.
Pearl S. Buck
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.
Pearl S. Buck
I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody.
Pearl S. Buck
There was an old abbot in one temple and he said something of which I think often and it was this, that when men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.
Pearl S. Buck
Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother's Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.
Pearl S. Buck
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. (Pearl S. Buck)
There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.
Pearl S. Buck
Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless.
Pearl S. Buck
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.
Pearl S. Buck
I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.
Pearl S. Buck