Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Pearl Buck

1892 – 1973 CE

Growing up and living in China as the daughter and wife of Christian missionaries, Pearl Buck described their arrogance and manipulation arguing against the benefit of missionaries and an institutional church. Denounced in China during the cultural revolution and prevented from visiting with Richard Nixon, she wrote 60+ books, won a Pulitzer, and became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before they became popular or safe positions, she publicly challenged gender and racial discrimination while founding the first interracial and international adoption agency that placed over 5000 “unadoptable” children.

Eras

Sources

Dragon Seed

Unlisted Sources

A Bridge for Passing (1962)

"America's Medieval Women" (1938)​

China, Past and Present (1972)​

Men and Women, 1941

Of Men and Women, 1941

The Chinese Novel (1938)​

The Creative Mind at Work (1935)

This I Believe (1951)

To My Daughters With Love (1967)

To My Daughters, With Love (1967)

What America Means to Me (1943)

What America Means to Me, 1947

Quotes by Pearl Buck (49 quotes)

“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”

Chapters: 3. Weak Wishes, Strong Bones

Themes: Hope Less is More

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“I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.”

Chapters: 21. Following Empty Heart

Themes: Curiosity

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“The rich are always afraid.”

Chapters: 44. Fame and Fortune

Themes: Fear Wealth

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“One faces the future with one's past.”

Chapters: 51. Mysterious Goodness

Themes: Time

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

Chapters: 55. Forever Young

Themes: Progress

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“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.”

Chapters: 68. Joining Heaven & Earth

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“Hunger makes a thief of any man.”

Chapters: 75. Greed

Themes: Law and Order

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“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.”

Chapters: 67. Three Treasures

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“It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.”

from What America Means to Me, 1947

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“The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.”

from To My Daughters With Love (1967)

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“If a woman is to recapture the lost companionship with man and child, she must once more forget herself, as she did in the old pioneer days, and follow them into the world.”

from To My Daughters With Love (1967)

Themes: Family

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“Death they all knew, for each knew his end, but a kind death, a gentle death stealing like a dream upon the old or like healing upon the sick... But this new death was monstrous, a destruction beyond the mind of man.”

from Dragon Seed

Themes: Death and Dying

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“Where the woman is faithful, no evil can befall. The woman is the root and the man the tree. The tree grows only as high as the root is strong.”

from Dragon Seed

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“She knew that he was a man who knew what he did and why he did it, and before such a man a woman may keep silence and know that it will be well with her.”

from Dragon Seed

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“When a man becomes a soldier, he ceases to be a man and goes back to the beast he once was in some other life.”

from Dragon Seed

Themes: Warriors

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“Curse all these men who come into the world to upset it with wars! and curse them for spoiling our homes and fouling our women and making our life a thing of fear and emptiness! Curse such childish men that cannot have done with fights and quarrels in childhood... Curse all women who give birth to men who make war, and curse their grandmothers and all who are their kin!”

from Dragon Seed

Themes: Evil Aggression

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“Such men as this puppet are our worst and our true enemies, for they have betrayed themselves and us in them. The enemy from outside is a disease but the puppets are our own weakness”

from Dragon Seed

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“And do not choose a fool only because she has a pretty face. Some day he might kill a woman like that out of anger at her witlessness.”

from Dragon Seed

Themes: Illusion Beauty

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“a certain woman known all over the world... a rich, beautiful wilful woman, who had married a warlord... That woman had taken a raw strong ignorant man and as his wife she had shaped him into a ruler whose name the whole world now knew.”

from Dragon Seed

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“And so the first moment [he] put his eyes on her she was laughing and the sunlight fell on her and he saw her like this, her hair shining black and her cheeks red and her lips red and her teeth white and her head throw back in laughter, and he was struck as though a sword had fallen across his heart.”

from Dragon Seed

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“So now when he looked at the woman he wanted, it was no simple lust that he felt. He wanted her in many ways to fill out his own being in its lacks, and he was pleased to think her learned and different from himself, and because he knew his own worth, he was not afraid to let her be in some ways better than himself, and he felt her like him in his deepest parts.”

from Dragon Seed

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“Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.”

from To My Daughters, With Love (1967)

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“The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.”

from To My Daughters, With Love (1967)

Themes: Power Marriage

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

Themes: History

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“Hunger makes a thief of any man.”

Themes: Crime

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

Themes: Longevity

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“The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.”

Themes: Truth

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“The common sense of people will surely prove to them someday that mutual support and cooperation are only sensible for the security and happiness of all.”

from This I Believe (1951)

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“Like Confucius of old, I am absorbed in the wonder of earth, and the life upon it, and I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life... 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.”

from This I Believe (1951)

Themes: Sacred World

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“Half a century ago, no one had thought of world food, world health, world education. Many are thinking today of these things. In the midst of possible world war, of wholesale destruction, I find my only question this: are there enough people now who believe? Is there time enough left for the wise to act? It is a contest between ignorance and death, or wisdom and life. My faith in humanity stands firm.”

from This I Believe (1951)

Themes: Shambhala

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“For the truly creative mind in any field is no more than this — a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive— a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death... He must create. He must pour out creation. By some strange unknown pressing inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

from The Creative Mind at Work (1935)

Themes: Creativity

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“An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.”

from "America's Medieval Women" (1938)​

Themes: Control

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“I love people. I love my family, my children … but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.”

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“perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked.”

from China, Past and Present (1972)​

Themes: One Taste

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“You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”

Themes: Free Will

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“Such faith keeps me continually ready and purposeful with energy to do what one person can towards shaping the environment in which the human being can grow with freedom.”

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“A superior man blames himself, a common man blames others.”

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“All things are possible until they are proved impossible — and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.”

from A Bridge for Passing (1962)

Themes: Confidence

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

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“The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume.”

from The Chinese Novel (1938)​

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“Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored — it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.”

from What America Means to Me (1943)

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“Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.”

from What America Means to Me (1943)

Themes: Mistakes

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“It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.”

from What America Means to Me (1943)

Themes: Religion

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“The greatest blow for freedom that was ever struck in the world's history, perhaps, was when Abraham Lincoln decided that the slaves of the South were to be free and he freed them... He was very wise in the ways of men. He knew that deeper than anything else in the hearts of men everywhere is the wish for simple freedom- freedom without any promises even of protection, of food, of security- just freedom.”

from What America Means to Me (1943)

Themes: Freedom

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“A few men like war and enjoy it as a game. But most men and all women hate war. They will not fight with their whole hearts unless they are set aflame. And the torch is always the same words... "All persons held as slaves... are and henceforward shall be free.”

from What America Means to Me (1943)

Themes: War

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“Had Japan been a tenth as wise as Abraham Lincoln, had Hitler been a hundredth part as sensible, we today, the United States and England, would not have a chance in this war. .. But they have lost because they attacked lands already free, and because they have enslaved peoples accustomed to freedom. By this one thing alone, if by no other, they are doomed. They have misread the hearts and minds of men.”

from What America Means to Me (1943)

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“Work is the one supreme privilege which will really make them |women| free.”

from Men and Women, 1941

Themes: Livelihood

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“The most tragic person in our civilization is the middle-aged woman whose duties in the home are finished, whose children are gone, and who is in her mental and physical prime and yet feels there is no more need for her.”

from Men and Women, 1941

Themes: Meaningfulness

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“Not to see the infinite number of things to be done is to prove the damage that privelege does to the perceptions; not to do after she sees is to prove the damage already done to her will.”

from Of Men and Women, 1941

Themes: Golden Chains

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Quotes about Pearl Buck (1 quotes)

“[Pearl Buck] was a spokesman on all sorts of issues: freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the adoptability of disadvantaged children, the future of China, especially the battle for women's rights, for education. If you followed in her trail, as I did, you were put in touch with almost every major movement in the United States — intellectual, social, and political.”

James Michener 1907 – 1997 CE
Historical and Generational Saga Master


from Interview (1991)

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