Pearl S. Buck

“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.”

“There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.”

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

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

“Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother’s Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.”

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

“It is a shameful sign of our arrogance that our history departments have almost no Chinese history in them, our literature courses almost no Chinese literature, our philosophy departments almost none of the great Chinese systems of philosophy. And our religious schools have been the most arrogant of all. This ignorant arrogant mind has become fixed in its patterns. It is the pattern which considers anything not American to be inferior — unless it be English.”

“Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless.”

“Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.”

“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.”

“All things are possible until they are proved impossible — and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.”

“One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or to what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful.”

“What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.”

“The secret of joy in work is contained in one word — excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.”

“Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break.”

“Ah well, perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked.”

“There was an old abbot in one temple and he said something of which I think often and it was this, that when men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.”

“The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.”

“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and so they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.”

“Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.”

“The Chinese novel was written primarily to amuse the common people. And when I say amuse I do not mean only to make them laugh, though laughter is also one of the aims of the Chinese novel. I mean amusement in the sense of absorbing and occupying the whole attention of the mind. I mean enlightening that mind by pictures of life and what that life means.”

“Did one man write Shui Hu Chuan, or did it grow to its present shape, added to, rearranged, deepened and developed by many minds and many a hand, in different centuries? Who can now tell? They are dead. They lived in their day and wrote what in their day they saw and heard, but of themselves they have told nothing.”

“Out of this folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with thousands of years of life, grew, literally, the Chinese novel. For these novels changed as they grew. If, as I have said, there are no single names attached beyond question to the great novels of China, it is because no one hand wrote them. From beginning as a mere tale, a story grew through succeeding versions, into a structure built by many hands.”

“The street is noisy and the men and women are not perfect in the technique of their expression as the statues are. They are ugly and imperfect, incomplete even as human beings, and where they come from and where they go cannot be known. But they are people and therefore infinitely to be preferred to those who stand upon the pedestals of art.”

“Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.”

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

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

“It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.”

“I believe with all my heart that jimcrow is wicked and I know that it is a rotten core in our society. I know that we cannot say that we are a full democracy so long as jimcrow exists anywhere in our country. I will fight against it and refuse to countenance it in all was that I can, as long as I live. And yet I know that were all jimcrow laws to be abolished tomorrow, the war for the lberation of mankind would still not be won here. There would still be those not free, not equal.”

“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.”

“I suppose Abraham Lincoln knew that was what would happen. He was very wise in the ways of men. He knew how people think and feel. Doubtless he knew that deeper than anything else in the hearts of men everywhere is the wish for simple freedom- freedom without any promises even of protection, of food, of security- just freedom. He knew that those people, so long bond, would leave even comfortable sheltered places where masters were kind, if they could only be free.”

“Like Confucius of old, I am absorbed in the wonder of earth, and the life upon it, and I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, than this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being. With so profound a faith in the human heart and its power to grow toward the light, I find here reason and cause enough for hope and confidence in the future of mankind.”

“The common sense of people will surely prove to them someday that mutual support and cooperation are only sensible for the security and happiness of all. Such faith keeps me continually ready and purposeful with energy to do what one person can towards shaping the environment in which the human being can grow with freedom.”

“In the midst of possible world war, of wholesale destruction, I find my only question this: are there enough people now who believe? Is there time enough left for the wise to act? It is a contest between ignorance and death, or wisdom and life. My faith in humanity stands firm.”

“In any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until some day inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle. … I came home more torn in heart than any child should be, for I saw that each side was right as well as wrong, and I yearned over both in a helpless fashion, unable to see how, history being what it was, anything now could be done.”

“Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.”

“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.”

“Yet somehow 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 in the way that it cares for its helpless members.”

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

“The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.”

“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.”

“When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.”

“To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.”

“You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”

“Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.”

“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.”

“Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.”

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

“To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.”

“Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.”

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

“Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.”

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

“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.”

“Love alone could waken love.”

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

“Love dies only when growth stops.”

“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.”

“Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my 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.”

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

“Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.”

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

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

“One faces the future with one's past.”