Top 250 Pearl S. Buck Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I should like to penetrate your mind with my own,” he said. “I should like to pierce the mysteries of your soul.”

— Pearl S. Buck

202. “There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses.”

— Pearl S. Buck

203. “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

204. “The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change.”

— Pearl S. Buck

205. “Body and soul are partners, and neither must desert the other.”

— Pearl S. Buck

206. “Make love! He disliked the phrase. Could one make love?”

— Pearl S. Buck

207. “The Empress Mother said with still more irritation, “I cannot understand why we must have a foreign religion here when we have three good religions of our own.”

— Pearl S. Buck

208. “None on earth can love those who declare that they alone are the sons of God.”

— Pearl S. Buck

209. “Nations, like individuals, can only learn by their own individual experience.” Yul-chun.”

— Pearl S. Buck

210. “If the belly is full,” she said, “if we could know that it would always be full, men would be idle and laugh and play games like children, and then we would have peace and happiness.”

— Pearl S. Buck

211. “Never reproach him with his own weakness, for then he will become wholly weak. Never let him feel that but for you he would be useless, for then he will indeed become useless. You must search for the few strong threads in him and weave your fabric with those, and where the threads are weak, never trust to them. Supply your own in secret.”

— Pearl S. Buck

212. “He could have been lonely except that he was never lonely, since he had always been alone.”

— Pearl S. Buck

213. “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

214. “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

215. “To do good, to love justice, to grant that all men had an equal right to a pleasant life, these things Kung Chen believed in, and believing, he did all he could to perform his belief.”

— Pearl S. Buck

216. “The head raised too high even in good will be struck off too soon.”

— Pearl S. Buck

217. “The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.”

— Pearl S. Buck

218. “War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.”

— Pearl S. Buck

219. “Times were chosen and appointed. If one forced them, they were wrong.”

— Pearl S. Buck

220. “The very young are not ready for much knowledge. It must be given to them slowly, in proportion to their years of life. One must first live before he can safely know.”

— Pearl S. Buck

221. “For generations fathers had watched earth and sea.”

— Pearl S. Buck

222. “He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man’s house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.”

— Pearl S. Buck

223. “We are compelled to choose,” he sometimes complained, “between the savagery of Communism and the vulgarism of America.”

— Pearl S. Buck

224. “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.”

— Pearl S. Buck

225. “Love must be taken on the tide, before it ebbs.”

— Pearl S. Buck

226. “But is strength comfort for a woman?”

— Pearl S. Buck

227. “To belong to one was to deny himself the privilege of belonging to all.”

— Pearl S. Buck

228. “You see how loving kindness conquers fear, even in animals. Let this lesson be engraved upon your hearts.”

— Pearl S. Buck

229. “We must save ourselves by doing what is godlike and we will become godlike.”

— Pearl S. Buck

230. “Now, as they were all looking at the new moth, she, too, went to look at it. It was of a creamy yellow color, like the yellow of the lemon called Buddha’s Hand, and it had long black antennae. These quivered as it felt itself impaled. The wide wings fluttered and dark spots upon them showed green and gold for a moment. Then the moth was still. “How quickly they die!” Ch’iuming said suddenly.”

— Pearl S. Buck

231. “But I am fearful of it because I hear she is learned in the Four Books, and learning has never accompanied beauty in women.”

— Pearl S. Buck

232. “They were prisoners, trapped by old ways of life, jailed within the imperial palace. He was no more free than she was. Yet only she could do what she would. If she said she would be Empress, then none could hold her back.”

— Pearl S. Buck

233. “I do not blame you, child, for growing up,” she announced. “But I teach you this: Whatever happens is always the woman’s fault.”

— Pearl S. Buck

234. “But the important lesson which he taught me was that if one would be happy he must not raise his head above his neighbor’s. “He who raises his head above the heads of others,” Mr. Kung said, “will sooner or later be decapitated.”

— Pearl S. Buck

235. “Why must this happen to me?” To this there could be no answer and there was none. When I knew at last that there could never be an answer, my own resolve shaped into the determination to make meaning out of the meaningless, and so provide the answer, though it was of my own making.”

— Pearl S. Buck

236. “There was no need to hurry that future – yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?”

— Pearl S. Buck

237. “The first peaches of spring – the first peaches! Buy, eat, purge your bowels of the poisons of winter!”

— Pearl S. Buck

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

— Pearl S. Buck

239. “Our bodies can be mobilized by law and police and men with guns, if necessary-but where shall we find that which will make us believe in what we must do, so that we can fight through to victory?”

— Pearl S. Buck

240. “Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control.”

— Pearl S. Buck

241. “The days of my youth are past and to a woman full grown a kiss means everything – or nothing.”

— Pearl S. Buck

242. “Who rules well is always hated.”

— Pearl S. Buck

243. “And as she had learned to do, while she pondered on large things, she acted on small ones.”

— Pearl S. Buck

244. “Old One,” the tenant said apologetically. “It is none of my business and I ought to die, but after all they are the children of your elder brother’s son who after all is the first in the next generation after you.”

— Pearl S. Buck

245. “I am never better pleased than when I know a book of mine can be bought for fifty cents or, better still, for twenty-five. No people can be educated or even cultivated until books are cheap enough for everybody to buy.”

— Pearl S. Buck

246. “Can one spit on a smiling face?” he inquired; or he said, “Vengeance cannot last a night’s sleep.”

— Pearl S. Buck

247. “As life has proved, it is true that a woman’s body is more important than her mind. She alone can create new human creatures. Were it not for her, the race of man would cease to exist. Into her body, as into a chalice, Heaven has put this gift. Her body therefore is inexpressibly precious to man. He is not fulfilled if she does not create. His is the seed, but she alone can bring it to flower and fruit in another being like himself.”

— Pearl S. Buck

248. “And from that time on the boys were no longer called Elder and Younger, but they were given school names by the old teacher, and this old man, after inquiring into the occupation of their father, erected two names for the sons; for the elder, Nung En, and for the second Nung Wen, and the first word of each name signified one whose wealth is from the earth.”

— Pearl S. Buck

249. “Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.”

— Pearl S. Buck

250. “Had she not created even him? Perhaps for that he never forgave her, but hated her and fought her secretly, and dominated her and oppressed her and kept her locked in houses and her feet bound and her waist tied, and forbade her wages and skills and learning, and widowed her when she was dead, and burned her sometimes to ashes, pretending that it was her faithfulness that did it.”

— Pearl S. Buck