James Baldwin Quotes
200 James Baldwin Quotes
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What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rule of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and change it and fight it – at no matter what risk.
James Baldwin
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others.
James Baldwin
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. 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, which is the only fact we have.
James Baldwin
The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
James Baldwin
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 Baldwin
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
James Baldwin
Fathers and sons arrive at that relationship only by claiming that relationship: that is by paying for it. 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 Baldwin
It is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
James Baldwin
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
James Baldwin
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, which is the only fact we have.
James Baldwin
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James Baldwin
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James Baldwin
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 Baldwin
To defend oneself against fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.
James Baldwin
The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way… people look at reality, then you can change it.
James Baldwin
We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
James Baldwin
Human freedom, is a complex, difficult – and private – thing. If we can liken life, for a moment, to a furnace, the freedom is a fire which burns away illusion.
James Baldwin
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.
James Baldwin
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 Baldwin
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this is an immutable law… Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It mean’s you’re afraid of the other side of the coin – to love and be loved.
James Baldwin
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once the hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
James Baldwin
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James Baldwin
Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned.
James Baldwin
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way the person faces and uses his experience.
James Baldwin
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 breaking of bread.
James Baldwin
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.
James Baldwin
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 Baldwin
Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
James Baldwin
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 Baldwin
If the concept of God has any validity or use, it can only be to make us larger, freer and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.
James Baldwin
If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne.. If we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.
James Baldwin
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James Baldwin
It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life.
James Baldwin
It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
James Baldwin
If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne.
James Baldwin
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 Baldwin
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 Baldwin
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 Baldwin
Every legend contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
James Baldwin
Fire’s 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 Baldwin
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