Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage and indeed perhaps more.

It is love itself that is important — the ability to love, no matter whom you love. For when you can no longer love anyone, you are no longer a living person. The heart dies if it loses the capacity to love.

In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.

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.

The body was so little a part of him that its final stillness seemed nothing of importance. He was half out of it anyway and death was only a slipping out of it altogether and being at last what he always was, a spirit. We buried the pearly shell upon the mountain top.

Once the ‘what’ is decided, the ‘how’ always follows. We must not make the ‘how’ an excuse for not facing and accepting the ‘what.’

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Exclusion is always dangerous. Inclusion is the only safety if we are to have a peaceful world.