Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

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.

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

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?

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.

The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.

The greatest problem that war leaves, in a man, is how to recapture reality. That's because war is unreal.

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

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.

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.

It is better not to say "lend." There is only giving.

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

No daughter is ever her mother's darling. That spot is always reserved for the son.

music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful.

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

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon.

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