Quotes By James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
James A. Baldwin
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
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
James A. Baldwin
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
James A. Baldwin
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
James A. Baldwin
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
James A. Baldwin
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
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.
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 is a growing up.
James A. Baldwin
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