James A. Baldwin famous quotes

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Inspirational #Change #Leadership

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Love #Life #Friendship

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Hate #Men #Law

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Inspirational #Positive #Motivational Sports

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Book #Writing #People

If the word integration means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it
-- James A. Baldwin

#Brother #Mean #Reality

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Pain #Thinking #World

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Fit

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Love #Romantic #Broken Heart

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Inspirational #Success #Broken Heart

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Encouragement #Pain #Hate

Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Thinking #Views #Revelations

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Joy #Sorrow #Needs

There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
-- James A. Baldwin

#People #World #Process

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Faith #Light #Sea

A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Risk

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Justice #Slave #Born

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Family #Education #Children

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Work #Men #Fire

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Journey #Perspective #Looks

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.
-- James A. Baldwin

#New York #Mistake #Cities

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Educational #Paradox #Conscious

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Thinking

It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.
-- James A. Baldwin

#School #Years #Desire

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Passion #Army #Sacrifice

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Knowledge #Science #Government

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life
-- James A. Baldwin

#Mistake #Passion #Rebel

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Pain #People #Way

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Respect #Thinking #Effort

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Inspirational Love #Faces #Lovers

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
-- James A. Baldwin

#Believe #Trying #Causes

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Eye #Men #Attention

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.
-- James A. Baldwin

#People #Needs #Done

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Able #Victim #Threat

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
-- James A. Baldwin

#People #Giving #Parent

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Helping Others #Reality #People

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Art #Kindness #Survival

Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
-- James A. Baldwin

#Crowns

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Inspirational #Limitation

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Past #Pressure #Clay

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Light #Darkness #Suffering

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
-- James A. Baldwin

#Inspirational #Freedom #Government

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Dark #Artist #Safety

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Men #Thinking #Order

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Country #Hands #Racism

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
-- James A. Baldwin

#People #Culture #Literature

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Liberty #Affliction #Crutches

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Ignorance #Justice #Enemy

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Writing #Editors #Literature

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Inspirational #Change #People

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Beautiful #Literature #American History

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
-- James A. Baldwin

#Love #Thinking #Heaven

Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too the terms with which they are connected to other people.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Art #Mean #People

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Education #Teacher #Children

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Time #Future #Blessing

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Men #White #Black

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
-- James A. Baldwin

#African American #Philanthropy #Made

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Time #Firsts #First Time

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Fathers Day #Son #Earth

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Education #Country #Independent

People can cry much easier than they can change.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Change #People #Self Improvement

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Change #Literature #Human Nature

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Life #Happiness #Success

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Life #Change #Needs

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Country #African American #Literature

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Heart #Evil #Imagination

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Respect #People #Water

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Falling In Love #Gay #Journey

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Black And White #People #Forever

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Inspirational #Black #Poverty

The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Future #Heaven #Want

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
-- James A. Baldwin

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Children #Light #Sea

If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Real #Writing #Effort

One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Sweet #Art #Real

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Way #Facts #Force

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Home #Irrevocable

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Two #Way #Allegiance

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Christian #Culture #Raised

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Years #Taught #Filth

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Eye #Reality #People

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Real #Writing #Shifting

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Responsibility #People

It is a terrible, an inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Law #Humanity #Faces

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Children #Taken #Rain

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Country #Law #Class

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Writing #Light #Cities

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Ideas #White #Progress

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Artist #Heaven #Assuming

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Together #Society #Legends

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Acceptance #Limits #Accepting

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.
-- James A. Baldwin

#America #Black #Rage

Words like 'freedom', 'justice' and 'democracy' are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous, and above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Freedom #Knowing #Justice

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Inspirational #Able

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Happiness #Lying #Discipline

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Travel #Europe #People

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Power #Morality #Subtle

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Country #Moving #Thinking

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Men #Thinking #Vision

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
-- James A. Baldwin

#Literature #Danger #Committed