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

James Baldwin Famous Quotes & Sayings

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

The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country.

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

It's always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.

Men - not just babies like you, but old men, too - they always need to have a woman tell them the truth. Les hommes, ils sont impossibles.

We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.

It was a gesture of great despair and I knew that she was giving herself, not to me, but to that lover who would never come.

Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

You took the best, so why not take the rest?

Love was a country he knew nothing about.

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

Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

I was often allowed to watch them drink their cocktails.

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.

Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably,

She was in a terrible state, for she found that she could neither take her eyes off him nor look at him.

A man is not a man until he's able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.

What kind of friendship have you had?
Or for that matter ... what kind of love affairs?

Come out, come out, wherever you are!

One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found - and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

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

For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over.

I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea.

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

Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!

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.

A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.

I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had no meaning.

With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

Artists are the only people in a society who will tell that society the truth about itself.

You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

No man is a devil in his own mind.

Nothing is more unbearable, once has it, than freedom.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

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

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

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

I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me.

The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.

The impossible is the least that one can demand.

It is your responsibility to change the society if you think yourself as an educated person

And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.

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 want to be an honest man and a good writer.

Everything was as it had been between us, and at the same time everything was different.

At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.

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

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

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

I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

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

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

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

I don't know any writers who don't drink.

You might feel different out there, with all the sunshine and oranges and all.

It's a long way," John said slowly, "ain't it? It's a hard way. It's uphill all the way.

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.

Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.

If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad.

This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

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

Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

...love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don't panic now.

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

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

You face reality, not the lights. The lights go off as quickly as they come on.

all men were like this, their thoughts rose no higher, and they lived only to gratify on the bodies of women their brutal and humiliating needs. One

We stared at each other across a narrow space that was full of danger, that almost seemed to roar, like flame.

'Come,' he said.

You don't realize you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.

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.

I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this point, is all that can carry me out of it.

Our humanity is our burden, our life. We need not battle for it. We need only to do what is infinitely more difficult: that is, accept it.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

The sons of the masters were roaming the world, looking for arms to hold them. And the arms that might have held them
could not forgive.

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

All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.

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

But the Atlantic Ocean is deep and wide and money doesn't hurry from the other side.

In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.

The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself.