Inspiring Wisdom: A Collection of James Baldwin Quotes

"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 Baldwin

"Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

- James Baldwin

"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 Baldwin

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."

- James Baldwin

"The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now."

- 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

"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."

- James Baldwin

"The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions."

- 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

"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."

- James Baldwin

"I want to be an honest man and a good writer."

- James Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

"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 Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

"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 Baldwin

"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 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

"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 are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

- James Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."

- James Baldwin

"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

- James Baldwin

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

- 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

"Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?"

- James Baldwin

"Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black."

- James Baldwin

"People can cry much easier than they can change."

- James Baldwin

"You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself."

- James Baldwin

"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose."

- James Baldwin

"You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."

- James Baldwin

"The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land."

- James Baldwin

"Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it."

- James Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

"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

"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."

- James Baldwin

"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."

- James Baldwin

"I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative."

- James Baldwin

"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing."

- James Baldwin

"If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not."

- James Baldwin

"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 Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

"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 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 making of bread."

- James Baldwin

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

- James Baldwin

"I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

- James Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

"The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love."

- James Baldwin

"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 Baldwin

"The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others."

- James Baldwin

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."

- James Baldwin

"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone."

- James Baldwin

"The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black."

- James Baldwin

"Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings."

- James Baldwin

"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."

- James Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

"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 Baldwin

"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

- James Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."

- James Baldwin

"It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror."

- James Baldwin

"Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities."

- James Baldwin

"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did."

- James Baldwin

"There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it."

- James Baldwin

"The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory."

- James Baldwin

"When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living."

- James Baldwin

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

- James Baldwin

"The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now."

- James Baldwin