409 Quotes by Pearl S. Buck

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.

I should like to penetrate your mind with my own,” he said. “I should like to pierce the mysteries of your soul.

It is not poverty that is to be heared, but the lack of balance between riches and poverty.

As for inhibitions, I’ve spent a lifetime developing them, and I don’t intend to lose them.

Somehow 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 yourself.

The narrator refers to a character as “an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.

Never reproach him with his own weakness, for then he will become wholly weak. Never let him feel that but for you he would be useless, for then he will indeed become useless. You must search for the few strong threads in him and weave your fabric with those, and where the threads are weak, never trust to them. Supply your own in secret.

To repay evil with kindness is the proof of a good man; a superior man blames himself, a common man blames others.

You are an artist,” she said. “But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.