James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 9

Quotes about:

• Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

  James A. Baldwin

  Justice, Experience, Innocence

  7 Copy quote

• But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

  James A. Baldwin

  Someone You Love, Horror, Chips

  4 Copy quote

• Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

  James A. Baldwin

  Inability, Emotion, Dishonesty

  "Everybody’s Protest Novel". Essay by James A. Baldwin (1949), as quoted in "Uneasy Rider" by Alexandra Schwartz, www.newyorker.com. November 9, 2015.

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• Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Writing, Labels

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• For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

  James A. Baldwin

  Unbearable

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• Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.

  James A. Baldwin

  Maturity, Love Is, Lightning

  4 Copy quote

• Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

  James A. Baldwin

  White, Forever, Black

  "The Price of the Ticket". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1985.

  6 Copy quote

• Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.

  James A. Baldwin

  New York, Mistake, Cities

  13 Copy quote

• Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

  James A. Baldwin

  Christian, Culture, Raised

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• The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Men, White Man

  8 Copy quote

• There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed ... But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

  James A. Baldwin

  Children, Men, Artist

  7 Copy quote

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

  James A. Baldwin

  Wisdom, People, History

  "Justice at last?" by Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com. June 5, 2005.

  9 Copy quote

• No man is a devil in his own mind.

  James A. Baldwin

  Men, Mind, Devil

  43 Copy quote

• 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

  Long, Doe, World

  11 Copy quote

• If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

  James A. Baldwin

  Life, Thinking, Trying

  6 Copy quote

• Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

  James A. Baldwin

  Echoes, Profound, Desire

  9 Copy quote

• Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.

  James A. Baldwin

  Passion, Challenges, Friendly

  8 Copy quote

• No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

  James A. Baldwin

  Ignorance, Fire, Imagination

  5 Copy quote

• We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

  James A. Baldwin

  People, Independence, Mind

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• In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.

  James A. Baldwin

  Men, Thinking, Vision

  10 Copy quote

• Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, War, Artist

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• The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Answers, Purpose

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• You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

  James A. Baldwin

  Home, Left

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• Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

  James A. Baldwin

  Luxury, Confusion, Young

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• The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

  James A. Baldwin

  Betrayal, Believe, Would Be

  "Stranger in the Village". Harper's Magazine; republished in "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), October 1953.

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