Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

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.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

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.

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.

Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.

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

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old... - Wang Lung

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.

The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation.

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.

All things are possible until they are proven impossible.

The rich are always afraid.

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

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?

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmitted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.