Quotes by Pearl S. Buck

“To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.”

“Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.”

“To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)”

“I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.”

“Fear alone makes man weak. If you are afraid, your hands tremble, your feet falter, and your brain cannot tell hands and feet what to do.”

“We must learn to live with danger, " he now said to Kino. "Do you mean the ocean and the volcano cannot hurt us if we are not afraid?" Kino asked. "No," his father replied. "I did not say that. Oce...”

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

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

“Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took ...”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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”

“Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.”

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy i...”

“He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he was dead, since hi...”

“For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he l...”

“The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.”