Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

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.

We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights.

People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.

The only real danger to our country is from within, that we forget our own power to be what we want to be.

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

There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

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

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

What the common man cannot understand he hates.

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.

The destruction of ideals, whether those ideals were right or wrong, must also have been a shock to the mind and the heart. Life without idealism is empty indeed. We must have hope as we must have bread; to eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

She had always been too wise to tell him all she thought and felt, knowing by some intuition of her own womanhood that no man wants to know everything of any woman.

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

men cannot be free in a nation where women are forbidden freedom.

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.

The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.

It certainly must have been a relief for women of the country to realize that one could be a woman and a lady and yet be thoroughly political.

The feeling one has after coming to know American women is that they are starving at their sources.

The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.

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.

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.

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

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