James A. Baldwin Quotes About Effort

Quotes about: Effort

• 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

  Work, Men, Fire

• Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Mean, People

  Interview with Studs Terkel (1961), as quoted in "Conversations With James Baldwin" edited by Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, May 1, 1989.

• Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

  James A. Baldwin

  Motivational, Freedom, Individual Effort

  "The Crusade of Indignation" by James A. Baldwin in "The Nation" (New York, July 7, 1956); later quoted in James A. Baldwin "The Price of the Ticket", 1985.

• If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Writing, Effort

• 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 breaking of bread.

  James A. Baldwin

  Respect, Thinking, Effort

  "Eighty-Five from the Archive: James Baldwin" by Erin Overbey, www.newyorker.com. February 11, 2010.

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