01UndatedLove cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
02UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
03UndatedNow, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old...- Wang LungPearl S. Buck / quote ↗
04UndatedTo serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
06UndatedI don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
07UndatedThe 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.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
08UndatedFear 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 / quote ↗
09UndatedWe 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 don't 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.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
10UndatedAnd 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 / quote ↗
11UndatedIt is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
13UndatedHe 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.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
15UndatedTo those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
16UndatedA good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
17UndatedWang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from the earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But not for the first time, such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than life itself - clothes upon the body of his son.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
18UndatedThis was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
19UndatedSomehow 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 yourselfPearl S. Buck / quote ↗
20UndatedFate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
21UndatedThe 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 thatwithout 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.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
22UndatedFor he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗
24UndatedOf course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.Pearl S. Buck / quote ↗