Pearl S. Buck Quotes - Page 2

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

What the common man cannot understand he hates.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together.

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?

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.

Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.

We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage and indeed perhaps more.

No daughter is ever her mother's darling. That spot is always reserved for the son.

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

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

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.

I do not believe in a child world. It is a fantasy world. I believe the child should be taught from the very first that the whole world is his world, that adult and child share one world, that all generations are needed.

Somehow 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

music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful.

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.

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.

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

Integrity is honesty carried through the fibres of the being and the whole mind, into thought as well as action so that the person is complete in honesty. That kind of integrity I put above all else as an essential to leadership.

Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.

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

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.

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