Pearl S. Buck

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

You are free when you gain back yourself,” Madame Wu said. “You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.

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.

To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.

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.

God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness . He is not in the general. He is in the particular.

Science and religion, religion and science, put it as it may, they are the two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two focus together, reveal the truth.

When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.

But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?

French is the most beautiful,” he said, “and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

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

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

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

There will never cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food.

What seems new is only new to us.

There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

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