James A. Baldwin Quotes
Top 85 wise famous quotes and sayings by James A. Baldwin
James A. Baldwin Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from James A. Baldwin on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change 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.
It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.
It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
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.
One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
A devotion to humanity is ... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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.
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.
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.