Pearl S. Buck Quotes

I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

I was complexed and awkward that I was good for nothing and was always lying. I would lie to my school friends that I was a stud in my colony and to my colony friends that I was a stud in the school cricket and football teams, though I was in no team.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

Promising is not giving, but serves to content fools.

I did not know anybody cared any longer about these sorts of things. Now I have a hold on the fools.

Sitting in marble corridors waiting for important people to lie to you.

From my own kind I only learn How foolish comfort is

I am king. I am lord. I am praiseworthy. I am important. I am magnificent. I am foremost. I am a hero. I am a warrior. I am a lion, and I am virile.

I challenge you [other men] to see if you can use the same qualities that you feel make you a man to go deeper into yourself. Your strength, your bravery, your toughness: Can we redefine what those mean and use them to explore our hearts? Are you brave enough to be vulnerable? To reach out to another man when you need help? To dive headfirst into your shame? Are you strong enough to be sensitive, to cry whether you are hurting or you're happy, even if it makes you look weak? Are you confident enough to listen to the women in your life? To hear their ideas and their solutions? To hold their anguish and actually believe them, even if what they're saying is against you? And will you be man enough to stand up to other men when you hear "locker room talk," when you hear stories of sexual harassment? When you hear your boys talking about grabbing ass or getting her drunk, will you actually stand up and do something so that one day we don't have to live in a world where a woman has to risk everything and come forward to say the words "me too?"

Anyone who says they are a hard man - they aren't.

Alas, we have not yet the power to render completely sterile or make impossible the errors and lies which will merely be America being itself rather than its unconvincing promise.

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

I often used to think myself in the case of the fox-hunter, who, when he had toiled and sweated all day in the chase as if some unheard-of blessing was to crown his success, finds at last all he has got by his labor is a stinking nauseous animal. But my condition was yet worse than his; for he leaves the loathsome wretch to be torn by his hounds, whilst I was obliged to fondle mine, and meanly pretend him to be the object of my love.

Courageous, unconcerned, scornful, coercive - so wisdom wisheth us; she is a woman, and ever loveth only a warrior.

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.

Who does Not Know the Truth, is simply a Fool... Yet who Knows the Truth and Calls it a Lie, is a Criminal.

Not all men were meant to dance with dragons.

People still cheat on their wives, that hasn't fallen out of fashion. We all speak of it badly, but it has not fallen out of fashion.

The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.

Courage is essential to leadership.

His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That's when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn't even an angel, just a liar with wings.

Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.

I have, alas! Philosophy, Medicine, Jurisprudence too, And to my cost Theology, With ardent labor, studied through. And here I stand, with all my lore, Poor fool, no wiser than before.