Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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.
Pearl S. Buck
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.
Pearl S. Buck
The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore they attempt the impossible-and achieve it generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
All things are possible until they are proved impossible-and even the impossible may only be so as of now.
Pearl S. Buck
The secret of joy in work is contained in one word-excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
Pearl S. Buck
The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore they attempt the impossible-and achieve it generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
All things are possible until they are proved impossible-and even the impossible may only be so as of now.
Pearl S. Buck
The secret of joy in work is contained in one word-excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
Pearl S. Buck
Praise out of season or tactlessly bestowed can freeze the heart as much as blame.
Pearl S. Buck
The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore they attempt the impossible-and achieve it generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
We must have hope or starve to death.
Pearl S. Buck
When hope is taken away from the people moral degeneration follows swiftly after.
Pearl S. Buck
To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.
Pearl S. Buck
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
Pearl S. Buck
We need to restore the full meaning of that old word duty. It is the other side of rights.
Pearl S. Buck
I am comforted by life's stability by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge.
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 earth.
Pearl S. Buck
It is better not to say "lend." There is only giving.
Pearl S. Buck
Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.
Pearl S. Buck
One faces the future with one's past.
Pearl S. Buck
Once the "what" is decided the "how" always follows. We must not make the "how" an excuse for not facing and accepting the "what."
Pearl S. Buck
When we know what we want to prove we go out and find our facts. They are always there.
Pearl S. Buck
In this unbelievable universe in which we live there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines reaching into infinity meet somewhere yonder.
Pearl S. Buck
Introversion at least if extreme is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.
Pearl S. Buck
Truth is always exciting. Speak it then life is dull without it.
Pearl S. Buck
All things are possible until they are proved impossible and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.
Pearl S. Buck
This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him.
Pearl S. Buck
As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.
Pearl S. Buck
Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.
Pearl S. Buck
Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless.She knew she was immortal.
Pearl S. Buck
To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think.
Pearl S. Buck
Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.
Pearl S. Buck
Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.
Pearl S. Buck
And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted,and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked.
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
Wandering is never waste, dear boy,' he said. 'While you wander you will find much to wonder about, and wonder is the first step to creation.
Pearl S. Buck
Out of the woman's great brown breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at the one breast it flowed like a fountain from the other, ans she let it flow. There was more than enough for the child, greedy though he was, life enough for many children, and she let it flow out carelessly, conscious of her abundance. There was always more. Sometimes she lifted her breast and let it flow out upon the ground to save her clothing, and it sank into the earth and made a soft, dark, rich spot in the field. The child fat and good-natured and ate of the inexhaustible life his mother gave him.
Pearl S. Buck
The narrator refers to a character as "an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.
Pearl S. Buck
An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison
Pearl S. Buck
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that's where I renew my springs that never dry up. ~Pearl Buck
Pearl S. Buck
There was no need to hurry that future—yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?
Pearl S. Buck
The old deep sadness of life lay in the bottom of her heart and she knew it was there, but she would not allow herself to sink into it. Out of the dark and sullen bottom of a lake the lotus flowers bloomed upon its surface, and she would pluck the flowers.
Pearl S. Buck
However impatient she might be in the day, however filled with little sudden angers, at night she was all tenderness.
Pearl S. Buck
Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.
Pearl S. Buck
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.
Pearl S. Buck
A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated — and turned out to grass.
Pearl S. Buck
Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.
Pearl S. Buck
All things are possible until they are proven impossible.
Pearl S. Buck
For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home.
Pearl S. Buck
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 thatwithout 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.
Pearl S. Buck
Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.
Pearl S. Buck
Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself
Pearl S. Buck
This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.
Pearl S. Buck
Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from the earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But not for the first time, such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than life itself - clothes upon the body of his son.
Pearl S. Buck
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
Pearl S. Buck
To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)
Pearl S. Buck
The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.
Pearl S. Buck
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.
Pearl S. Buck
Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.
Pearl S. Buck
It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.
Pearl S. Buck