409 Quotes by Pearl S. Buck

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

This imperial woman, so diverse and rich in her genius, might have chosen her own greatness had she been able to single one gift above another, but she could not make her own choice of what she loved best to do, and so she did something of each and in all she excelled. As for those affairs of state which had absorbed her until.

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

To hate another human being is to take a worm into one’s own vitals. It consumes life.

When one commits one’s self to an airborne craft and the door is fastened against earth and home, there is no escape even by running away. The result is a strange sense of peace – desperate, perhaps, but peace.

I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it.

Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever.

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.

The greatest problem that war leaves, in a man, is how to recapture reality. That’s because war is unreal.