James A. Baldwin Quotes (70 Quotes)


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

    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.

    The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

    We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

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


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

    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.

    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.

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

    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.

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

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

    The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

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

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

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

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

    Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.

    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.

    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.


    For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

    The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

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

    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.

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

    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.

    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.

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

    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.

    The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

    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.

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

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

    When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.


    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.

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

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

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

    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.

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

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

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

    Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.

    The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.


    More James A. Baldwin Quotations (Based on Topics)


    World - Love - Man - People - Time - History - America - Education - Success - Heaven - Generation - Life - Society & Civilization - Experience - Sense & Perception - Hatred - Beauty - Reasoning - Future - View All James A. Baldwin Quotations

    Related Authors


    Malcolm Gladwell - Leo Buscaglia - Virginia Woolf - Victor Hugo - Henry David Thoreau - Hans Christian Andersen - Brian Tracy - Upton Sinclair - Lu Xun - Jackie Collins


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