Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu

American Novelist and Humanitarian, Nobel Prize in Literature and Pulitzer Prize Winner

"Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from the earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But not for the first time, such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than life itself - clothes upon the body of his son."

"We are not empire builders. How important this fact is no American who has not lived in Asia can appreciate. It goes against our conscience, which is a very tender part of the American spirit. Therefore we are learning how to hold our allies, not by force of arms and government, but by mutual benefit and friendship. So much is already clear... I am therefore hopeful. In spite of dismaying contradictions in individuals in our national scene, I feel the controlling spirit or our people, generous, decent, and sane. In this 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."

"We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights."

"We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country."

"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."

"Western scholars, contemptible in their pretentious and shallow scholarship, have translated Tao as Way. How foolish! Tao is Spirit, the Spirit that permeates all heaven and all earth, even those far beyond ours. Tao includes all that is not, and all that is; Lao Tzu describes it in these words. Silent, aloof, alone, It changes not, nor fails, but touches all.I do not know its name, One name for it is Tao.Pressed for designation,I call it -- Tao.Tao means Outgoing, Outgoing, Far-reaching, Far-reaching, Return."

"Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge."

"When hope is taken away from the people moral degeneration follows swiftly after."

"When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place."

"When people work beyond their destiny, all they do fails."

"When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there."

"Why should we hate them? Because ours is the only true civilization! Even in science -- consider that we invented the sternpost rudder twelve hundred years before the Europeans did! Fore-and-aft sails in the third century! Treadmill paddle wheel for boats five hundred years later! Warships with rams and twenty paddle wheels by the twelfth century -- the British thought we had copied theirs, the fools! In the thirteenth century we had ships with fifty cabins for passengers, six-masts, double planking, water-tight compartments! Only in the last century did the barbarians even have transverse bulkheads! Five hundred years ago we already had ships four hundred and fifty feet long, and we grew fresh vegetables aboard in tubs! WE sailed the high seas to Sumatra and India, to Aden and Africa and even to Madagascar -- sixty years before the Portuguese bit a piece from the thigh of India! I curse Confucius and all those mad saints who persuaded us against war! Did you ever hear of Sun Wa, who lived three thousand years ago? No? Read the Art of War! 'If you are not in danger, do not fight,' he wrote. Now we are in danger!"

"With so profound a faith in the human heart and its power to grow toward the light, I find here reason and cause enough for hope and confidence in the future of mankind."

"Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident."

"Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless."

"Yet somehow 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 in the way that it cares for its helpless members."

"Yet there were times when he did love her with all the kindness she demanded, and how was she to know what were those times? Alone she raged against his cheerfulness and put herself at the mercy of her own love and longed to be free of it because it made her less than he and dependent on him. But how could she be free of chains she had put upon herself? Her soul was all tempest. The dreams she had once had of her life were dead. She was in prison in the house. And yet who was her jailer except herself?"

"You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea."

"You cannot stop time, but for love sometimes stops."

"You must set forth and find the center of your interest. You are a creator, but you must find your interest and then dedicate yourself to that interest?not to the act of creativity. Merely to want to create will make it impossible for you to do so. You must find an interest greater than yourself?a love, perhaps?and then the power to create will set you on fire."