Quotes By 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.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

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.

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

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.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

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.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

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

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.