James Baldwin quote: "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."

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

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and t...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN

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

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the i...
JAMES BALDWIN

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN

Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered ...
JAMES BALDWIN

People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN

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

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and th...
JAMES BALDWIN

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES BALDWIN

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself...
JAMES BALDWIN

The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea...
JAMES BALDWIN

The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the poin...
JAMES BALDWIN

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described...
JAMES BALDWIN

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that ...
JAMES BALDWIN

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
JAMES BALDWIN

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I ...
JAMES BALDWIN

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the m...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without mo...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people ...
JAMES BALDWIN

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
JAMES BALDWIN

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we ...
JAMES BALDWIN

We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man...
JAMES BALDWIN

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in...
JAMES BALDWIN

The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to e...
JAMES BALDWIN

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the inde...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on...
JAMES BALDWIN

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other his...
JAMES BALDWIN

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wre...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world...
JAMES BALDWIN

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the pa...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting...
JAMES BALDWIN

The future is... black.
JAMES BALDWIN

Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom...
JAMES BALDWIN

Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. Peop...
JAMES BALDWIN

James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no on...
JAMES BALDWIN

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze...
JAMES BALDWIN

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own e...
JAMES BALDWIN

Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.
JAMES BALDWIN

Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.
JAMES BALDWIN

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, ...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion...
JAMES BALDWIN

There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one ou...
JAMES BALDWIN

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themsel...
JAMES BALDWIN

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a s...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly si...
JAMES BALDWIN

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibilit...
JAMES BALDWIN

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied ...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and stre...
JAMES BALDWIN

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocu...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a ...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immut...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their abili...
JAMES BALDWIN

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on th...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN

Whose little boy are you?
JAMES BALDWIN

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN

There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are...
JAMES BALDWIN

To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how...
JAMES BALDWIN

Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's...
JAMES BALDWIN

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are descr...
JAMES BALDWIN

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be reall...
JAMES BALDWIN

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the arti...
JAMES BALDWIN

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also peopl...
JAMES BALDWIN

A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
JAMES BALDWIN

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; a...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.
JAMES BALDWIN

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
JAMES BALDWIN

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

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where...
JAMES BALDWIN

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to thier hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the In...
JAMES BALDWIN

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossib...
JAMES BALDWIN

The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the dis...
JAMES BALDWIN

The first time I saw Reverend Shuttlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot o...
JAMES BALDWIN

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior ar...
JAMES BALDWIN

The distance between us, and I had never thought of this before, was that they did not know this, an...
JAMES BALDWIN

Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two unde...
JAMES BALDWIN

People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to p...
JAMES BALDWIN

I remembered his older brother, who had died in Sicily, in battle for the free world- he had barely ...
JAMES BALDWIN

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is ...
JAMES BALDWIN

All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that th...
JAMES BALDWIN

It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was...
JAMES BALDWIN

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves ...
JAMES BALDWIN

I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fi...
JAMES BALDWIN

I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.
JAMES BALDWIN

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their...
JAMES BALDWIN

Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever di...
JAMES BALDWIN

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current a...
JAMES BALDWIN

Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are...
JAMES BALDWIN

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than th...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

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

Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed onl...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not ...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to...
JAMES BALDWIN

[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simpl...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young...
JAMES BALDWIN

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the indepen...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, b...
JAMES BALDWIN

Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it
JAMES BALDWIN

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impass...
JAMES BALDWIN

In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word...
JAMES BALDWIN

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the s...
JAMES BALDWIN

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be JAMES BALDWIN

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to ex...
JAMES BALDWIN

If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory pl...
JAMES BALDWIN

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.
JAMES BALDWIN

The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization...
JAMES BALDWIN

Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents,...
JAMES BALDWIN

I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked...
JAMES BALDWIN

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, f...
JAMES BALDWIN

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that ga...
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

It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do bo...
JAMES BALDWIN

It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really...
JAMES BALDWIN

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, fo...
JAMES BALDWIN

She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Da...
JAMES BALDWIN

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I w...
JAMES BALDWIN

I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we di...
JAMES BALDWIN

Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so muc...
JAMES BALDWIN

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the fo...
JAMES BALDWIN

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect...
JAMES BALDWIN

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one...
JAMES BALDWIN

The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, ...
JAMES BALDWIN

In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be for...
JAMES BALDWIN

Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
JAMES BALDWIN

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even ...
JAMES BALDWIN

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human li...
JAMES BALDWIN

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another....
JAMES BALDWIN

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN

I have met only a very few people - and most of these were not Americans - who had any real desire t...
JAMES BALDWIN

To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past ca...
JAMES BALDWIN

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN

When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now...
JAMES BALDWIN

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by dro...
JAMES BALDWIN

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for...
JAMES BALDWIN

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which ...
JAMES BALDWIN

The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which...
JAMES BALDWIN

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN

how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live...
JAMES BALDWIN

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immu...
JAMES BALDWIN

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
JAMES BALDWIN

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does ...
JAMES BALDWIN

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use t...
JAMES BALDWIN

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began sear...
JAMES BALDWIN

People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me fo...
JAMES BALDWIN

I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by gi...
JAMES BALDWIN

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or sh...
JAMES BALDWIN

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look a...
JAMES BALDWIN

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWIN

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

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

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The ...
JAMES BALDWIN

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

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

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

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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

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