Top 250 Pearl S. Buck Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.”

— Pearl S. Buck

102. “And roots, if they are to bear fruits, must be kept well in the soil of the land.”

— Pearl S. Buck

103. “Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.”

— Pearl S. Buck

104. “Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.”

— Pearl S. Buck

105. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

106. “The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.”

— Pearl S. Buck

107. “Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.”

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

109. “What is the conscience? It is the most highly developed part of the human being, the core of the spirit, the most sensitive, the most tender.”

— Pearl S. Buck

110. “It is ironical that in an age when we have prided ourselves on our progress in the intelligent care and teaching of children we have at the same time put them at the mercy of new and most terrible weapons of destruction.”

— Pearl S. Buck

111. “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;.”

— Pearl S. Buck

112. “For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.”

— Pearl S. Buck

113. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

114. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

115. “When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there.”

— Pearl S. Buck

116. “I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody.”

— Pearl S. Buck

117. “The greatest problem that war leaves, in a man, is how to recapture reality. That’s because war is unreal.”

— Pearl S. Buck

118. “But hers was a strange heart, sad in its very nature, and she could never weep and ease it as other women do, for her tears never brought her comfort.”

— Pearl S. Buck

119. “Vermont is a country unto itself.”

— Pearl S. Buck

120. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

121. “Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.”

— Pearl S. Buck

122. “The children are waiting for us,” she said. Those were her words, but what she really said was that I must live and begin now to live. Death must not interrupt life. There were others waiting for us.”

— Pearl S. Buck

123. “Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.”

— Pearl S. Buck

124. “Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.”

— Pearl S. Buck

125. “It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.”

— Pearl S. Buck

126. “The feeling one has after coming to know American women is that they are starving at their sources.”

— Pearl S. Buck

127. “I do not believe there is any important difference between men and women – certainly not as much as they may be between one woman and another or one man and another.”

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

129. “On this earth, though far and near, without love, there’s only fear.”

— Pearl S. Buck

130. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

131. “The old deep sadness of life lay in the bottom of her heart and she knew it was there, but she would not allow herself to sink into it. Out of the dark and sullen bottom of a lake the lotus flowers bloomed upon its surface, and she would pluck the flowers.”

— Pearl S. Buck

132. “It is not poverty that is to be heared, but the lack of balance between riches and poverty.”

— Pearl S. Buck

133. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

134. “So Wang Lung sat, and so his age came on him day by day and year by year, and he slept fitfully in the sun as his father had done, and he said to himself that his life was done and he was satisfied with it.”

— Pearl S. Buck

135. “And out of his heaviness there stood out strangely but one clear thought and it was a pain to him, and it was this, that he wished he had not taken the two pearls from O-lan that day when she was washing his clothes at the pool, and he would never bear to see Lotus put them in her ears again.”

— Pearl S. Buck

136. “It certainly must have been a relief for women of the country to realize that one could be a woman and a lady and yet be thoroughly political.”

— Pearl S. Buck

137. “This imperial woman, so diverse and rich in her genius, might have chosen her own greatness had she been able to single one gift above another, but she could not make her own choice of what she loved best to do, and so she did something of each and in all she excelled. As for those affairs of state which had absorbed her until.”

— Pearl S. Buck

138. “To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium.”

— Pearl S. Buck

139. “Now it has been said from ancient times that all women who weep may be divided into three sorts. There are those who lift up their voices and their tears flow and this may be called crying; there are those who utter loud lamentations but whose tears do not flow and this may be called howling; there are those whose tears flow but who utter no sound and this may be called weeping.”

— Pearl S. Buck

140. “It is better not to say “lend.” There is only giving.”

— Pearl S. Buck

141. “Love changes,” she replied. “When the flame dies, the glow remains, but it no longer centers upon one human creature and it warms the whole soul. Then the soul looks at all human creatures with love diffused.”

— Pearl S. Buck

142. “With increasing passion she loved beauty, for beauty, she told herself, and only beauty, was pure and good and worthy of her love.”

— Pearl S. Buck

143. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

144. “Can such stiff and formal moldings as words capture the spirit-essence of love?”

— Pearl S. Buck

145. “At heart a truly modest man, he had nevertheless the modest man’s pride in his modesty in the face of achievement.”

— Pearl S. Buck

146. “All birth is unwilling.”

— Pearl S. Buck

147. “Hope must come out of what we have, or it is not hope, but a dream.”

— Pearl S. Buck

148. “I wish to produce the fruit of my brain for my country’s good. A mere dog may fill the earth with the fruit of his body!”

— Pearl S. Buck

149. “For Nature is not unjust. She does not steal into the womb and like an evil fairy give her good gifts secretly to men and deny them to women. Men and women are born free and equal in ability and brain. The injustice begins after birth.”

— Pearl S. Buck

150. “Drive out the tiger by the front gate and let in the wolf by the back gate,...”

— Pearl S. Buck