James A. Baldwin quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by James A. Baldwin

James A. Baldwin Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from James A. Baldwin on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Recognizing a problem doesn't always bring a solution, but until we recognize that problem, there can be no solution.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

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

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.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.

I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive.

Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.

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.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.

A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.

One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.

The purpose of education ... is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.

All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

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.

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

The trick is to love somebody ... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

I will no longer take anyone's word for my experience.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

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

The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

Writing is a political instrument.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.

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

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

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

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

Hatred destroys the person who hates.

After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only be setting someone free.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.

You cannot fix what you will not face.

One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.

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

I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.

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

One writes out of one thing only-one's own experience,

Man cannot live by profit alone.

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

Every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

All racists are irresponsible.

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

Employment is my right my destiny.

Great art can only be created out of love.

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.

Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.

If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

A devotion to humanity is ... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin
to love and be loved.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

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