The Eternal Wonder Quotes

“Wandering is never waste, dear boy,' he said. 'While you wander you will find much to wonder about, and wonder is the first step to creation.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“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.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“There was no need to hurry that future—yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“Make love! He disliked the phrase. Could one make love?”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“Life is the wonder with which we are all infused. …”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“don’t know what to tell you,” he said slowly. “I have not had time to think much about myself. Wherever I have been—at least until now, I have been mostly alone. The others were always much bigger—much older.” He paused to consider himself in the past. “Older in years, that is,” he amended. “I’ve always been too old for myself.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Then you have an old soul.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“His problem was the eternal question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“He could have been lonely except that he was never lonely, since he had always been alone.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“Books are a shortcut to total knowledge. You can’t learn everything by your own experience. Use experience to test what you have already learned in books—”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think. My life is yet in spring. I look forward to the summer and I shall enjoy my autumn years and I’m sure I shall approach the finality of life with the same curiosity that has plagued me in everything so far. Perhaps one day I shall look back on this entire life as but a page out of the whole of my existence, and if I do I am sure it will be with the same thirst to know more—the certain knowledge that there are truths, the reasons for which we cannot know. … Perhaps that is the whole point of it all—the eternal wonder.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“Children do divide a woman, in an odd sort of way.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“This is one of the main reasons I wished to come to America. I wished to see with my own heart if it would be different and it is not. Even here in New York, and I understand it is true of every major city in this vast and beautiful land, there is a Chinatown and a Latin quarter and an Italian section and a Negro neighborhood and blockbusters and riots and all of that as your own fearful civil war continues even one hundred years after it is supposedly over. And look again at the plight of the only real Americans, the American Indians. No, my dear, one cannot really ever know how it is to be anything unless one is indeed that thing.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“The less intelligent and civilized of the human race continue to reproduce as a matter of course with either no, or at most very little, thought to the future overpopulation and resulting famine or anything else. They go on, generation after generation, reproducing merely because it is their nature to do so. The more intelligent and civilized members of human society, on the other hand, are using birth-control methods in their effort to control population growth and, so, are slowly breeding themselves out of existence or at least into what is already a serious minority.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“That is what I hate most about this war game. It cuts off communication between peoples. We cannot ask questions and so we cannot get answers.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“Books he would always learn from, for people, great people, put the best of themselves into books. Books were a distillation of people. But people would be his teachers, and people were not in schoolrooms. People were everywhere.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder

“Nothing is destroyed, only changed.”
― Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder