Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

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

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.

Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it.

All things are possible until they are proved impossible - and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.

One faces the future with one's past.

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.

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.

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

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your 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

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

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

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

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.

Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.

Love alone could waken love.

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.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.

Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds.

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