Top 250 Pearl S. Buck Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Drive out the tiger by the front gate and let in the wolf by the back gate,...”

— Pearl S. Buck

152. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

153. “For this Mary’s words were not surcharged with oversubtle meaning. No, she spoke them out swiftly and with sharp clearness and each word had its own weight and meaning and no more, good tools of her mind, but not messengers of vague suggestion.”

— Pearl S. Buck

154. “As for inhibitions, I’ve spent a lifetime developing them, and I don’t intend to lose them.”

— Pearl S. Buck

155. “Well, and you may have lived in the courts of the Old Lord, and you were accounted beautiful, but I have been a man’s wife and I have borne him sons, and you are still a slave.”

— Pearl S. Buck

156. “Leah was more than beautiful. She was filled with some spirit, a high quality, which Peony admired and did not understand. The Chinese said of her, “She is heaven-good.” They meant that her goodness was natural and that it flowed from a fountain within herself.”

— Pearl S. Buck

157. “When one commits one’s self to an airborne craft and the door is fastened against earth and home, there is no escape even by running away. The result is a strange sense of peace – desperate, perhaps, but peace.”

— Pearl S. Buck

158. “The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.”

— Pearl S. Buck

159. “The narrator refers to a character as “an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.”

— Pearl S. Buck

160. “Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.”

— Pearl S. Buck

161. “This is I. I am as you see me. I do not care to be otherwise.”

— Pearl S. Buck

162. “Only people who are assured of daily food can concern themselves with matters of principle and ethic. A man will become a slave rather than starve.”

— Pearl S. Buck

163. “He was part of a whole, a people scattered over the earth and yet eternally one and indivisible. Wherever a Jew lived, in whatever safety and isolation, he still belonged to his people.”

— Pearl S. Buck

164. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

165. “I do not know when it is that the joy fades out of school for most children, so that they end not only by hating school but even worse, by hating books, and this is grave indeed, for in books alone is the accumulated wisdom of the whole human race, and to read no books is to deprive the self of ready access to wisdom.”

— Pearl S. Buck

166. “An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at. He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can’t risk anybody laughing at them.”

— Pearl S. Buck

167. “The feet bear the burden of the body, the head the burden of the mind, and the heart the burden of the spirit.”

— Pearl S. Buck

168. “I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it.”

— Pearl S. Buck

169. “I am always moved, with grateful wonder, by the goodness of people. For the few who are prying or meanly critical, for the very few who rejoice in the grief of others, there are the thousands who are kind. I have come to believe that the natural human heart is good, and I have observed that this goodness is found in all varieties of people, and that it can and does prevail in spite of other corruptions. This human goodness alone provides hope enough for the world. I have sometimes.”

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

171. “You are an artist,” she said. “But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.”

— Pearl S. Buck

172. “The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.”

— Pearl S. Buck

173. “The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.”

— Pearl S. Buck

174. “Attachment,” Buddha had said, “is the cause of grief.”

— Pearl S. Buck

175. “You cannot be happy until you understand that life is sad.”

— Pearl S. Buck

176. “This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him.”

— Pearl S. Buck

177. “It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe.”

— Pearl S. Buck

178. “Learn the good that you can of the foreign people and reject the unsuitable.”

— Pearl S. Buck

179. “But no, it was not the small single moment which had killed him. It was the anger of all his life here in this house which he himself had built and lived in and hated all his years.”

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

181. “What a man does in his own house cannot concern the nation.”

— Pearl S. Buck

182. “To hate another human being is to take a worm into one’s own vitals. It consumes life.”

— Pearl S. Buck

183. “No, they were there, these missionaries, to fulfill some spiritual need of their own. It was a noble need, its purposes unselfish, partaking doubtless of that divine need through which God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son for its salvation. But somewhere 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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

184. “Believing in gods always causes confusion.”

— Pearl S. Buck

185. “In silence they lay close, without passion, but closer than passion could bring them they lay close.”

— Pearl S. Buck

186. “For the soul of man is born fresh in every child, and there is an age in every creature, unless he is debased too young, when for a time he sees clearly the difference between truth and falsehood, and hypocrisy infuriates him. He cannot forgive those who should be true and instead are liars. This fury, I believe, is the first cause for revolutions throughout history.”

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

188. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

189. “All that had been was now no more.”

— Pearl S. Buck

190. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

191. “It is natural anywhere that people like their own kind, but it is not necessarily natural that their fondness for their own kind should lead them to the subjection of whole groups of other people not like them.”

— Pearl S. Buck

192. “The gift he had been given was sometimes heavy to bear, the ability always to understand why the other person was as he was. Wounded, yes, but never angry, and there were times when he longed to feel fierce personal anger.”

— Pearl S. Buck

193. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

194. “If I have learned anything in my long life it is to be grateful for every occasion when I followed my sympathies and avoided my antipathies.”

— Pearl S. Buck

195. “When we define democracy now it must still be as a thing hoped for but not seen.”

— Pearl S. Buck

196. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

197. “It is not well for a man to know more than is necessary for his daily living.”

— Pearl S. Buck

198. “Long ago she had learned that to seem to yield is always stronger than to show resistance, and to acknowledge a fault quickly is always to show an invincible rectitude.”

— Pearl S. Buck

199. “There should be a deep attachment, heart should be tied to heart between parent and child, for unless the child learns how to love a parent profoundly, I believe that he will never learn how to love anyone else profoundly, and not knowing how to love means the loss of the meaning of life and its fulfillment.”

— Pearl S. Buck

200. “From the stars,” she thought, “doubtless all things are seen.”

— Pearl S. Buck