Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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

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

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.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

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

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

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.

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

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

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.

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

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

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

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.

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.

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