Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

if one can surmount poverty and can love in moderation, there is no obstacle to happiness for anyone.

Who rules well is always hated.

People everywhere do not concern themselves much beyond the common round of everyday, and this is the chief problem for a democratic government, whose success depends upon an informed and responsible citizenry.

The children are waiting for us," she said. Those were her words, but what she really said was that I must live and begin now to live. Death must not interrupt life. There were others waiting for us.

I don't know, Pierce. But I do know that when men are frightened and discontented they gather around any man who is not afraid.

So Wang Lung sat, and so his age came on him day by day and year by year, and he slept fitfully in the sun as his father had done, and he said to himself that his life was done and he was satisfied with it.

The tears of the old come as easily as the tears of children

With increasing passion she loved beauty, for beauty, she told herself, and only beauty, was pure and good and worthy of her love.

Times were chosen and appointed. If one forced them, they were wrong.

Long ago she had learned that to seem to yield is always stronger than to show resistance, and to acknowledge a fault quickly is always to show an invincible rectitude.

Now it has been said from ancient times that all women who weep may be divided into three sorts. There are those who lift up their voices and their tears flow and this may be called crying; there are those who utter loud lamentations but whose tears do not flow and this may be called howling; there are those whose tears flow but who utter no sound and this may be called weeping.

Never reproach him with his own weakness, for then he will become wholly weak. Never let him feel that but for you he would be useless, for then he will indeed become useless. You must search for the few strong threads in him and weave your fabric with those, and where the threads are weak, never trust to them. Supply your own in secret.

I am entirely happy except that I feel the need of more knowledge of some sort. What sort I do not know myself." "Perhaps it is not so much knowledge as more understanding of that which you already know

Leah was more than beautiful. She was filled with some spirit, a high quality, which Peony admired and did not understand. The Chinese said of her, She is heaven-good. They meant that her goodness was natural and that it flowed from a fountain within herself.

It is easy to destroy but hard to create. Remember that, when you want to destroy something." The

But no, it was not the small single moment which had killed him. It was the anger of all his life here in this house which he himself had built and lived in and hated all his years.

Mind and body were well or ill together.

Can one spit on a smiling face?" he inquired; or he said, "Vengeance cannot last a night's sleep.

Love dies only when growth stops.

the superior man leads not by violence or by coarse physical acts but by the pure intelligence of a wise mind.

To belong to one was to deny himself the privilege of belonging to all.

It is not well for a man to know more than is necessary for his daily living.

There should be a deep attachment, heart should be tied to heart between parent and child, for unless the child learns how to love a parent profoundly, I believe that he will never learn how to love anyone else profoundly, and not knowing how to love means the loss of the meaning of life and its fulfillment.

Books, for example—she had thought of books as diversion and amusement. Now she knew they were communication between minds, her own and others, living and dead. Such communication was the source of learning and she had a thirst for learning