Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

I love people. I love my family, my children… but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

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.

A person's heart withers if it does not answer another heart.

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

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

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

to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe.

there is one word that can be the guide for your life- it is the word reciprocity.

You cannot be happy until you understand that life is sad

It is the end of a family- when they begin to sell their land. Out of the land we came and into we must go - and if you will hold your land you can live- no one can rob you of land.

And roots, if they are to bear fruits, must be kept well in the soil of the land.

You are right," he had said. "Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, 'Know thy neighbor as thyself." That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love.

Life is stronger than death.

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.

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

Nothing is menial where there is love.

Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession.

You are free when you gain back yourself," Madame Wu said. "You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.

Hunger makes thief of any man.

It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.

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.

However impatient she might be in the day, however filled with little sudden angers, at night she was all tenderness.