Top 250 Pearl S. Buck Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

154. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

156. “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

157. “All birth is unwilling.”

— Pearl S. Buck

158. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

161. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

164. “A woman’s mind is not an instrument apart from her other being. She does not separate herself as man does, now flesh, now mind, now heart. She is there as one, a unity complete and unified.”

— Pearl S. Buck

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

169. “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

170. “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

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. “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

173. “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

174. “Believing in gods always causes confusion.”

— Pearl S. Buck

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

181. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

187. “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

188. “Just as he lived with them alive, he will live with them dead. Someday he will accept their death as part of his life. He will weep no more. He will carry them in his memory and his thoughts. His flesh and blood are part of them. So long as he is alive, they, too, will live in him. The big wave came, but it went away. The sun shines again, birds sing, and earth flowers.”

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

196. “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

197. “As for their child, I am moved in two ways. He will have his own world to make. Being of neither East nor West purely, he will be rejected of each, for none will understand him. But I think, if he has the strength of both his parents, he will understand both worlds, and so overcome.”

— Pearl S. Buck

198. “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

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

— Pearl S. Buck

200. “The best thing in the world for each of us is that which we can best do, because it gives us the feeling of being useful. That’s happiness.”

— Pearl S. Buck