Best 217 quotes of Pearl S. Buck on MyQuotes

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without 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.

A favorite means of escaping the solution to any problem is to declare it too complex for solution. This absolves us from attempting solution. ... Any problem is too complex to solve when we do not wish to accept the conditions of solution. Solution is possible where acceptance is ready.

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

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

A knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. Fate...is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. 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.

All birth is unwilling.

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

A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated and turned out to grass.

an artist is always seeking revelation.

An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at. He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can't risk anybody laughing at them.

Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control.

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 cell.

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

As for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other country in the world.

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

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

A woman's mind is not an instrument apart from her other being. She does not separate herself as man does, now flesh, now mind, now heart. She is there as one, a unity complete and unified.

Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.

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.

Believing in gods always causes confusion.

But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?

Can such stiff and formal moldings as words capture the spirit-essence of love?

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

Chinese were bornwith an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them.... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.

destructiveness comes only when life isn't lived. People who can live their lives don't destroy themselves.

doing and being are very closely tied together, and unless you are doing what you secretly want to do, you aren't able to be the sort of person you want to be.

endurance of inescapable sorrow is something which has to be learned alone. And only to endure is not enough. Endurance can be a harsh and bitter root in one's life, bearing poisonous and gloomy fruit, destroying other lives. Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance and the knowledge that sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For 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.

Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it.

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.

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

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

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

Food for all is a necessity. Food should not be a merchandise, to be bought and sold as jewels are bought and sold by those who have the money to buy. Food is a human necessity, like water and air, it should be available.

For Nature is not unjust. She does not steal into the womb and like an evil fairy give her good gifts secretly to men and deny them to women. Men and women are born free and equal in ability and brain. The injustice begins after birth.

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.

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

For war to man, like childbirth to women, is simplifying in its emotions and activities. All the real problems of life can be put aside while the one thing is done and little thought is needed to do it. ... His hatreds can be expressed without censure, he can let his emotions run free, he can behave as dramatically, as heroically as he likes, and no one laughs at him. It is almost impossible for a man to behave heroically in the cool and ordinary times of peace. But in war anything is allowed him, he is praised and applauded and made much of, as women are excused and allowed for in pregnancy.

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.

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.

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.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.