Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.”

— James Baldwin

102. “Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.”

— James Baldwin

103. “The impossible is the least that one can demand.”

— James Baldwin

104. “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”

— James Baldwin

105. “The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.”

— James Baldwin

106. “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

107. “The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.”

— James Baldwin

108. “People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

— James Baldwin

109. “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

110. “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

111. “It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”

— James Baldwin

112. “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 Baldwin

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

— James Baldwin

117. “The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

— James Baldwin

118. “What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.”

— James Baldwin

119. “I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.”

— James Baldwin

120. “Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.”

— James Baldwin

121. “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”

— James Baldwin

122. “Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.”

— James Baldwin

123. “Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.”

— James Baldwin

124. “No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”

— James Baldwin

125. “It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.”

— James Baldwin

126. “The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”

— James Baldwin

127. “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”

— James Baldwin

128. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

— James Baldwin

129. “But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.”

— James Baldwin

130. “The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.”

— James Baldwin

131. “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

— James Baldwin

132. “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.”

— James Baldwin

133. “Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.”

— James Baldwin

134. “One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.”

— James Baldwin

135. “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 Baldwin

136. “When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.”

— James Baldwin

137. “Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.”

— James Baldwin

138. “I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.”

— James Baldwin

139. “I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years.”

— James Baldwin

140. “I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are not yet willing to pay it.”

— James Baldwin

141. “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 Baldwin

142. “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 Baldwin

143. “Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.”

— James Baldwin

144. “Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

146. “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

— James Baldwin

147. “I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.”

— James Baldwin

148. “He may be a very nice man. But I haven’t got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he’s got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.”

— James Baldwin

149. “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.”

— James Baldwin

150. “One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.”

— James Baldwin