Top 224 Quotes & Sayings by Pearl S. Buck - Page 4

It is worse than folly... not to recognize the truth, for in it lies the tinder for tomorrow.

At heart a truly modest man, he had nevertheless the modest man's pride in his modesty in the face of achievement.

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

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.

From that house there has come so much life that it ought never to die or fall into ruin... For me that house was a gateway to America.

I do not believe there is any important difference between men and women - certainly not as much as they may be between one woman and another or one man and another.

There is no beauty without order.

It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death can take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid.

I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The damage such perception did to me I have felt ever sinceI could never belong entirely to one side of any question.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

He was part of a whole, a people scattered over the earth and yet eternally one and indivisible. Wherever a Jew lived, in whatever safety and isolation, he still belonged to his people.

To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future.

For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.

Our bodies can be mobilized by law and police and men with guns, if necessary-but where shall we find that which will make us believe in what we must do, so that we can fight through to victory?

For no country is a true democracy whose women have not an equal share in life with men, and until we realize this we shall never achieve a real democracy on this earth.

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.

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.

Just about everything significant in my life happened after I passed forty. I was a housewife and mother, but yearned to be a writer. I worked at my writing whenever I could snatch a moment, and I assembled several manuscripts. I was just about forty when my first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published. Then a few months later came The Good Earth. My career was launched at last, and it has given me the richest possible satisfaction

As for inhibitions, I've spent a lifetime developing them, and I don't intend to lose them.

The highest civilizations -- the longest to last and I believe the most successful in human terms -- are those which have come the closest to achieving real understanding and mutual appreciation between men and women.

Vermont is a country unto itself.

The melting-pot idea is futile ... The brew in a melting pot is always boiling over.

At my age the bones are water in the morning until food is given them.

War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.

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.

God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness . He is not in the general. He is in the particular.

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.

Only people who are assured of daily food can concern themselves with matters of principle and ethic. A man will become a slave rather than starve.

Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.

You are right,” he had said. “Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, ‘Know thy neighbor as thyself.” That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love.

Believing in gods always causes confusion.

What a man does in his own house cannot concern the nation.

To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium.

I don't wait for moods - you'd never get anything done if you did.

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.

The concept of 'Momism' is male nonsense. It is the refuge of a man seeking excuses for his own lack of virility. I have listened to many women in various countries, and I have never found a woman who willingly 'mothers' her husband. The very idea is repulsive to her. She wants to mother the children while they are young, but never their fathers. True, she may be forced into the role of mother by a man's weaknesses and childishness, and then she accepts the role with dignity and patience, or with anger and impatience, but always with a secret, profound sadness unexpressed and inexpressible.

the heart never grows old.

It is easy to overthrow a government but very difficult to build a new one.

The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.

Men of action," whose minds are too busy with the day's work to see beyond it. They are essential men, we cannot do without them, and yet we must not allow all our vision to be bound by the limitations of "men of action.

In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.

He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he was dead, since his head drooped upon his shoulder and his eyes were closed above his bearded lips. Wang Lung looked at the pictured man in horror and with increasing interest.

I am not given to superstition, yet there are certain places in old Asian countries where human beings have been born and have lived and died for so many generations that the very earth is saturated with their flesh and the air seems crowded with their continuing presence.

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.