Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

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.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

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.

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.

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

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.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

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

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

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

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.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

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

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

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

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

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

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

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