Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”

— James Baldwin

52. “The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

— James Baldwin

53. “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

— James Baldwin

54. “It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.”

— James Baldwin

55. “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

— James Baldwin

56. “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

— James Baldwin

57. “The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

— James Baldwin

58. “The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.”

— James Baldwin

59. “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 Baldwin

60. “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.”

— James Baldwin

61. “A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.”

— James Baldwin

62. “You don’t need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!”

— James Baldwin

63. “Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head.”

— James Baldwin

64. “What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.”

— James Baldwin

65. “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.”

— James Baldwin

66. “If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.”

— James Baldwin

67. “People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

69. “The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.”

— James Baldwin

70. “Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.”

— James Baldwin

71. “To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.”

— James Baldwin

72. “Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”

— James Baldwin

73. “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”

— James Baldwin

74. “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

— James Baldwin

75. “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 Baldwin

76. “Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.”

— James Baldwin

77. “The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”

— James Baldwin

78. “An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.”

— James Baldwin

79. “And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.”

— James Baldwin

80. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

— James Baldwin

81. “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.”

— James Baldwin

82. “If you’re afraid to die, you will not be able to live.”

— James Baldwin

83. “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”

— James Baldwin

84. “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 Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

86. “An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.”

— James Baldwin

87. “Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin – to love and be loved.”

— James Baldwin

88. “Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.”

— James Baldwin

89. “It is a terrible, an inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.”

— James Baldwin

90. “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 Baldwin

91. “You write in order to change the world.”

— James Baldwin

92. “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 Baldwin

93. “God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.”

— James Baldwin

94. “There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”

— James Baldwin

95. “People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

— James Baldwin

96. “There was no room in God’s army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God’s will. Let the church cry amen to this!”

— James Baldwin

97. “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.”

— James Baldwin

98. “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.”

— James Baldwin

99. “The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.”

— James Baldwin

100. “I will no longer take anyone’s word for my experience.”

— James Baldwin