James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• The impossible is the least that one can demand.

  James A. Baldwin

  Demand, Impossible

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind". www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  James A. Baldwin

  Taken, Moments, Granted

  28 Copy quote

• Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

  James A. Baldwin

  Thinking, Views, Revelations

  24 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Love, Relationship, Romantic

  "Nobody Knows My Name". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

  81 Copy quote

• It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

  James A. Baldwin

  Helping Others, Reality, People

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  45 Copy quote

• 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 moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

  James A. Baldwin

  Children, Light, Sea

  "The Fire Next Time". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1963.

  11 Copy quote

• I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

  James A. Baldwin

  Love Is, Thinking, Inability To Love

  29 Copy quote

• People can cry much easier than they can change.

  James A. Baldwin

  Change, People, Self Improvement

  "James Baldwin Back Home" by Robert Coles, archive.nytimes.com. July 31, 1977.

  27 Copy quote

• It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

  James A. Baldwin

  Book, Writing, People

  The New York Times, June 1, 1964.

  52 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Inspirational, Life, War

  "Breaking Into James Baldwin's House" by Thomas Chatterton Williams, www.newyorker.com. October 28, 2015.

  10 Copy quote

• People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

  James A. Baldwin

  Life, Strong, Believe

  28 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Men, White, Black

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  22 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Home, Irrevocable, Conditions

  "Giovanni's Room". Book by James A. Baldwin (Part 2), www.newyorker.com. 1956.

  25 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Inspirational, Able, Dies

  13 Copy quote

• One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

  James A. Baldwin

  Sweet, Art, Real

  "Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1955.

  13 Copy quote

• I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

  James A. Baldwin

  Mean, Facts, Liberation

  "In Search of a Majority". James A. Baldwin's address at Kalamazoo College in Michigan (February 1960), as quoted in James A. Baldwin "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son", July 1961.

  12 Copy quote

• To be born in a free society and not to be born free is to be born into a lie. To be told by co-citizens and co-Christians that you have no value, no history, have never done anything that is worthy of human respect destroys you because in the beginning you believe it.

  James A. Baldwin

  Christian, Lying, Believe

  27 Copy quote

• The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

  James A. Baldwin

  Dream, Real, People

  17 Copy quote

• If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

  James A. Baldwin

  Religious, Use, Validity

  New Yorker 17 Nov. 1962 "Down at the Cross"

  15 Copy quote

• Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

  James A. Baldwin

  Fear, Grace, Growth

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James A. Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  25 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Education, Teacher, Children

  "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" by James A. Baldwin, archive.nytimes.com. July 29, 1979.

  16 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Knowledge, Science, Government

  "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

  11 Copy quote

• A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

  James A. Baldwin

  Moving, Home, People

  19 Copy quote

• The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

  James A. Baldwin

  Love You, Tricks, Persons

  19 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Heart, Evil, Imagination

  "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy". "Esquire" Magazine, May 1961.

  46 Copy quote

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