Pearl S. Buck Quotes - Page 5

There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses.

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.

Chinese were bornwith an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them.... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.

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

endurance of inescapable sorrow is something which has to be learned alone. And only to endure is not enough. Endurance can be a harsh and bitter root in one's life, bearing poisonous and gloomy fruit, destroying other lives. Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance and the knowledge that sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

Too many escape into complexity these days. For it is an escape for persons to cry, when this question of the equality of peoples is raised in India or in our own South, 'Ah, but the situation is not so simple.' ... no great stride forward is ever made for the individual or for the human race unless the complex situation is reduced to one simple question and its simple answer.

No longer can we afford to stuff the brains of the young with facts. The time is too short, the necessity for results too pressing. The new education must be based on the elimination of facts except as they illustrate principles. How to use facts, not how to accumulate them, is the purpose of true education.

Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it.

Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure.

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

when the people of any country choose peace at all costs, not even generals can make war.

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.

When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly thereafter.

Love dies only when growth stops.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

I learned to distinguish between the two kinds of people in the world: those who have known inescapable sorrow and those who have not.

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

Life is stronger than death.

destructiveness comes only when life isn't lived. People who can live their lives don't destroy themselves.

All in all, Vermont is a jewel state, small but precious.

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

I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.

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. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.

Our children ... are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children for too long, their world separate from the real world of life.

Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.