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.


James A. Baldwin

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isnt a man of action. Action is a ...
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a...
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves he is not a man of action. Action is a lac...
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action.
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
In order to act, you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
In order to act, you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
In order to act, you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
GEORGE CLEMENCEAU
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of a...
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
A man who has to be convinced to act before he acts is not a man of action. You must act as you brea...
GEORGE CLEMENCEAU
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of actio...
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
You will not make a man wiser by taking freedom of action from him. A man can only learn when he is ...
AUBERON HERBERT
A man of guilt acknowledges and changes himself immediately on being hinted slightly about his fault...
ANUJ SOMANY
The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception...
SAM HARRIS
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C.
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
PLATO
When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
STANLEY KUBRICK
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
E. M. CIORAN
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
EMILE M. CIORAN
I just want silence... nothing less... nothing more.
DEYTH BANGER
Life is a re-discovery.
BRIAN BLESSED
If you think that life is a celebration full of party poppers and merry go rounds it's not it's a ga...
GARY F EVANS...
Life Is a Misconception.
DEYTH BANGER
Life is a desire!
DEYTH BANGER
To trust someone you must firstly remember that it is a two way street that will go all the way if y...
GARY F EVANS...
It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
HENRI LOUIS BERGSON
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
HENRI BERGSON
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
There is no dharma greater than a word uttered by a man of conscience; there is no karma greater tha...
THIRUMAN ARCHUNAN
What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action...
JOSEPH BRODSKY
A great man even when dead,his name will continue to elicit greatness for generations to come.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
The light of a great man shines for generations to come.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
Who is a great man? A great man is a person whom people are dying to write books about.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought.
SALLUST
Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought.
HENRI BERGSON
Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought.
HENRI BERGSON
Stephen picks up on Armstrong's pier, and calls Kingstown pier "a disappointed bridge" (2.22)...
JAMES JOYCE
Fuck you and them... I don't like this rules!
DEYTH BANGER
For me, my life is a journey.
JAY ELECTRONICA
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but hes not a man of action...
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.
PETER NIVIO ZARLENGA
I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix.
DEYTH BANGER
You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it'...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
He is a man, who is to be a man, the fruit is always present in the seed.
TERTULLIAN
Aman who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of actio...
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
When he entered the anteroom, two women looked up at him. One was Miss Robertson, the governor's sec...
GEORGE P. ELLIOTT
Love isn't the work of the tender and the gentle;
Love is the work of wrestlers.
The one w...
JALALUDDIN MEVLANA RUMI
Life is a risk.
CARMELO ANTHONY
Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM
Do you want to be a man of today or a man of tomorrow?
MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATURK
When a man lacks mental balance in pneumonia he is said to be delirious. When he lacks mental balanc...
MARTIN H. FISCHER
Anyone who refuses to make a choice has already made a wrong choice by allowing his life for chance ...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY
Life is a journey. When we stop, things don't go right.
POPE FRANCIS
She was scarcely a year older than I was, dark-haired, slender, with a face that would break your he...
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.
LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA
Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.
JOAQUIN SETANTI
Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.
JOAQUIN SETANTI
Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.
SENECA
By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
E.M. FORSTER
If a wise man behaves prudently, how can he be overcome by his enemies? Even a single man, by right ...
SASKYA PANDITA
A man who sees action in inaction and inaction in action has understanding among men and discipline ...
BHAGAVAD GITA
oh, oh GreenHollyWood says with a smile and even and angry sounds like devil who comes from hell... ...
DEYTH BANGER
Man is manacled only by himself; thought and action are the jailers of Fate.
JAMES ALLEN
The man I am today it's not the man of yesterday
CHRISTOPHER FUDGE
The beauty of a woman may be the root of all evil. but the beauty is a only seen, your eyes wants to...
ARVIND YADAV
A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.
ARTHUR HELPS
You act at being a man, and before you know it, you are one.
RICHARD MADDEN
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
A man of action, forced into a state of thought, is unhappy until he can get out of it
JOHN GALSWORTHY
When you're a young man, a young boy, all you want to be is that action hero; you want to be the...
MATTHEW LEWIS
a man of action.
SIMON WIESENTHAL
The damage that occurred is a result, not an act of God, but an inaction and action of man.
LINDA PASADAVA
If you're losing, just be a man; be a man and lose as a man.
MARAT SAFIN
Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.
BRYANT H. MCGILL
Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and ...
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.
As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action o...
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Life is action and passion; therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and a...
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.
Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and ...
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR.
Not only is it harder to be a man, it is also harder to become one.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a go...
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing t...
DALE CARNEGIE
Be grateful for every moment and every breath.
TERESA COLLINS
Life is a school of probability.
WALTER BAGEHOT
This life is a process of learning.
LAURYN HILL
Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.
ANNE WILSON SCHAEF
Everybody in life is a chameleon.
MELANIE CHISHOLM
His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING
I wanted to tell you that I just--I miss you. And maybe that sounds ridiculous--like we barely know ...
TAMMARA WEBBER
Life is a grand party.
EZRA MILLER
The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he at...
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
It only serves to show what sort of person a man must be who can't even get testimonials. No, no...
JOSEPH PULITZER
My father was a good man, but he was a con man. He was a wanderer, nomadic.
DANNY AIELLO
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.....
RAYMOND CHANDLER
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. ...
REBECCA HARDING DAVIS
How lucky I am to have known somebody and something that saying goodbye to is so damned awful.
EVANS G. VALENS
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passio...
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passio...
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passio...
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR.

More James A. 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
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bomb...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening th...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice c...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, fo...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than tha...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, fo...
JAMES A. 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 A. BALDWIN
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the m...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusias...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immu...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
JAMES A. BALDWIN
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the w...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to ex...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the inde...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybod...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything an...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own e...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to cont...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be pr...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people ...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
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
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense...
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