James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.

  James A. Baldwin

  Heart, Answers

  17 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Literature, Habit, Live By

  7 Copy quote

• I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

  James A. Baldwin

  Mean, Facts, Liberation

  "In Search of a Majority". James A. Baldwin's address at Kalamazoo College in Michigan (February 1960), as quoted in James A. Baldwin "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son", July 1961.

  12 Copy quote

• People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

  James A. Baldwin

  Character, Names, People

  23 Copy quote

• People can cry much easier than they can change.

  James A. Baldwin

  Change, People, Self Improvement

  "James Baldwin Back Home" by Robert Coles, archive.nytimes.com. July 31, 1977.

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Writing, People

  The New York Times, June 1, 1964.

  52 Copy quote

• The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.

  James A. Baldwin

  Stars, Flower, Moon

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  14 Copy quote

• Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

  James A. Baldwin

  Thinking, Views, Revelations

  24 Copy quote

• I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Moving, Thinking

  "Autobiographical Notes" by James A. Baldwin (1952), republished in James A. Baldwin "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), archive.nytimes.com.

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Relationship, Romantic

  "Nobody Knows My Name". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

  81 Copy quote

• There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

  James A. Baldwin

  Ideas, People, Wish

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  17 Copy quote

• The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

  James A. Baldwin

  Thinking, White, Racism

  10 Copy quote

• Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

  James A. Baldwin

  African American, Wise Words, Humiliation

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  12 Copy quote

• The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

  James A. Baldwin

  Conformity, Should, Ideals

  10 Copy quote

• It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

  James A. Baldwin

  Helping Others, Reality, People

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  45 Copy quote

• Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

  James A. Baldwin

  Two, Way, Allegiance

  12 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Education, Teacher, Children

  "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" by James A. Baldwin, archive.nytimes.com. July 29, 1979.

  16 Copy quote

• People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.

  James A. Baldwin

  Roots, Creating, Water

  7 Copy quote

• We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them -- to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.

  James A. Baldwin

  Lying, Forever, Forgiving

  9 Copy quote

• Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

  James A. Baldwin

  Fear, Grace, Growth

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James A. Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  25 Copy quote

• 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.

  11 Copy quote

• The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Real, Order

  8 Copy quote

• You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

  James A. Baldwin

  Blood, Way, Beats

  11 Copy quote

• One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

  James A. Baldwin

  Sweet, Art, Real

  "Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1955.

  13 Copy quote

• The impossible is the least that one can demand.

  James A. Baldwin

  Demand, Impossible

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind". www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

  9 Copy quote

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