Quotes by Pearl S. Buck

“To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.”

“One faces the future with ones past.”

“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.”

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

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.To him...a touch is a blow,a sound is a noise,a misfortune is a tragedy,a joy is an ecstasy,a friend is a lover,a lover is a god,and failure is death.Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - - - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.

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.

Now, five years is nothing in a mans life except when he is very young and very old...- Wang Lung

To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

I dont wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

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.

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.

We must learn to live with danger, he now said to Kino. Do you mean the ocean and the volcano cannot hurt us if we are not afraid? Kino asked. No, his father replied. I did not say that. Ocean is there and volcano is there. It is true that on any day ocean may rise into storm and volcano may burst into flame. We must accept this fact, but without fear. We must say, Someday I shall die, and does it matter whether it is by ocean or volcano, or whether I grow old and weak? I dont want to think about such things, Kino said. it is right for you not to think about them, his father said. Then do not be afraid. When you are afraid, you are thinking about them all the time. Enjoy life and don not fear death - that is the way of a good Japanese.

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.

It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.

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

He saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearences he was dead, since his head drooped upon his shoulder and his eyes were closed above his bearded lips. Wang Lung looked at the pictured man in horror and with increasing interest.

The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.

To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much! (Buck, 57)