Quotes from Pearl S. Buck

Liz, it's so easy to say 'I'm sorry.' It costs nothing and it saves a mint of pain. Those two words are the common coin of daily life, but especially between people who love each other.

When I return to that house it will be with my son in my arms. I shall have a red coat on him and red-flowered trousers and on his head a hat with a small gilded Buddha sewn on the front and on his feet tiger-faced shoes. And I will wear new shoes and a new coat of black sateen and I will go into the kitchen where I spent my days and I will go into the great hall where the Old One sits with her opium, and I will show myself and my son to all of them.

he believed that to answer a child's question before it is asked is to destroy natural curiosity.

When people work beyond their destiny, all they do fails.

Throw eggs at a rock, and though one uses all the eggs in the world, the rock remains the same.

les gens se sentent seuls quand ils rêvent .

You are an artist," she said. "But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.

The very young are not ready for much knowledge. It must be given to them slowly, in proportion to their years of life. One must first live before he can safely know.

And to him war was a thing like earth and sky and water and why it was no one knew but only that it was.

I am always moved, with grateful wonder, by the goodness of people. For the few who are prying or meanly critical, for the very few who rejoice in the grief of others, there are the thousands who are kind. I have come to believe that the natural human heart is good, and I have observed that this goodness is found in all varieties of people, and that it can and does prevail in spite of other corruptions. This human goodness alone provides hope enough for the world. I have sometimes

The first peaches of spring - the first peaches! Buy, eat, purge your bowels of the poisons of winter!

If the belly is full," she said, "if we could know that it would always be full, men would be idle and laugh and play games like children, and then we would have peace and happiness.

There was no need to hurry that future—yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?

Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.

This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.

It is sweet to be loved, but to be able to love is to possess the life force. I love you. Therefore I am strong. Whatever my age, I am sustained by my own power to love.

And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted,and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked.

Wang Lung, seeing them, was fit to burst with pride at this procession of his goodly sons, who were to continue after him the life of his body;

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...this is the meaning of the word LOVE.

We must have this rule, for there are those whose hearts are so hard that they will come and buy this rice that is given for the poor--for a penny will not feed any man like this--and they will carry the rice home to feed to their pigs for slop. And the rice is for men and not for pigs (Buck, 105).

But somewhere I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself.

I think not everyone can see the whole picture. It has long been said we each see what we look for. You and I, we look at land and think of seed and harvests. A builder looks at the same land and thinks of houses, and a painter of its colors. The priest sees men only as those who need to be saved, and so naturally he sees most clearly those who need to be saved.

contempt for himself that a small piece of land should seem so important. Why, when he had poured out his silver proudly before the agent the man had scraped it up carelessly in his hands and said, "Here is enough for a few days of opium for the old lady, at any rate." And the wide difference that still lay between him and the great house seemed suddenly impassable as the moat full of

For the soul of man is born fresh in every child, and there is an age in every creature, unless he is debased too young, when for a time he sees clearly the difference between truth and falsehood, and hypocrisy infuriates him. He cannot forgive those who should be true and instead are liars. This fury, I believe, is the first cause for revolutions throughout history.