Aging & Wisdom Quote by Pearl S. Buck

Buck’s line lands like a warning dressed up as a simple observation: you don’t get to live in a vacuum. You can smash the idols, mock the priesthood, throw out the rituals, but the human need for meaning, authority, and belonging doesn’t politely disappear. It reroutes. The sentence structure is doing quiet work here: “destroy” sounds decisive, almost liberating, while “will find” is inevitability, the unconscious reflex. Buck isn’t romanticizing faith; she’s diagnosing attachment.

The subtext is less about theology than power. “Old gods” can be literal deities, but they also stand in for any inherited system that tells people who they are and what’s worth sacrificing for: nationalism, race, money, “progress,” ideology. Buck wrote across worlds - an American steeped in China’s cultural upheavals, watching tradition collide with modernity, colonial pressure, and revolution. In that context, iconoclasm isn’t purely heroic; it’s also a gateway for replacement dogmas. The banner changes, the fervor stays.

What makes the line work is its refusal to flatter the modern reader. It punctures the self-congratulating story that enlightenment is simply subtraction. Buck implies that the real contest isn’t between belief and disbelief; it’s between conscious commitments and the ones we stumble into when we assume we’re above needing any gods at all. The barb is practical: if you don’t choose your “new ones,” someone else will.