Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Great art can only be created out of love.”

— James Baldwin

202. “It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.”

— James Baldwin

203. “The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

— James Baldwin

204. “When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.”

— James Baldwin

205. “History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.”

— James Baldwin

206. “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 Baldwin

207. “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”

— James Baldwin

208. “I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.”

— James Baldwin

209. “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”

— James Baldwin

210. “An identity is questioned only when it is menaced... Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self...”

— James Baldwin

211. “For here you were, Big James, named for me – you were a big baby, I was not – here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”

— James Baldwin

212. “Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”

— James Baldwin

213. “It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.”

— James Baldwin

214. “The American soil is full of corpses of my ancestors– through 400 years and at least three wars. Why is my freedom, my citizenship, in question now?”

— James Baldwin

215. “There is no reason for you try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

— James Baldwin

216. “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.”

— James Baldwin

217. “So what can we really do for each other except – just love each other and be each other’s witness? And haven’t we got the right to hope – for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are?”

— James Baldwin

218. “People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.”

— James Baldwin

219. “If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impassable with our bodies the corridors to the gas chamber. For if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

— James Baldwin

220. “It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.”

— James Baldwin

221. “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

— James Baldwin

222. “I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.”

— James Baldwin

223. “All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.”

— James Baldwin

224. “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 Baldwin

225. “Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.”

— James Baldwin

226. “There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.”

— James Baldwin

227. “You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”

— James Baldwin

228. “I’m beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn’t make sense, how could it happen?”

— James Baldwin

229. “It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”

— James Baldwin

230. “Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.”

— James Baldwin

231. “I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.”

— James Baldwin

232. “If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it bring must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.”

— James Baldwin

233. “No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide.”

— James Baldwin

234. “But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol.”

— James Baldwin

235. “It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.”

— James Baldwin

236. “All art is a kind of confession.”

— James Baldwin

237. “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 Baldwin

238. “Employment is my right my destiny.”

— James Baldwin

239. “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”

— James Baldwin

240. “But it is part of the business of the writer – as I see it – to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.”

— James Baldwin

241. “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”

— James Baldwin

242. “But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can’t ever suffer again: and that’s worse.”

— James Baldwin

243. “It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.”

— James Baldwin

244. “You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”

— James Baldwin

245. “We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.”

— James Baldwin

246. “Books taught me that things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to everyone who is alive and who had ever been alive.”

— James Baldwin

247. “It’s astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body – the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.”

— James Baldwin

248. “But I felt that it was my heart which was broken. Something had broken in me to make me so cold and so perfectly still and far away.”

— James Baldwin

249. “If we understood ourselves better we would damage ourselves less.”

— James Baldwin

250. “Hatred destroys the person who hates.”

— James Baldwin