Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.”

— James Baldwin

302. “In the first place, as the homeless wanderers of the twentieth century prove, the question of nationality no longer necessarily involves the question of allegiance. Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.”

— James Baldwin

303. “John’s heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.”

— James Baldwin

304. “His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man’s descent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eye to wonder at, treasure and debris long forgotten on the bottom – bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearls that had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness all around him.”

— James Baldwin

305. “Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation.”

— James Baldwin

306. “With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.”

— James Baldwin

307. “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”

— James Baldwin

308. “Perhaps the best way to sum all this up is to say that the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped out of the south, to do battle overseas. It was, perhaps, like feeling that the most dangerous part of a dangerous journey had been passed and that now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen. Such a death would be, in short, a fact with which one could hope to live.”

— James Baldwin

309. “Swifter far than summer’s flight, Swifter far than youth’s delight, Swifter far than happy night, Art thou come and gone: As the earth when leaves are dead, As the night when sleep is sped, As the heart when joy is fled, I am left alone, alone.”

— James Baldwin

310. “Great art can only be created out of love.”

— James Baldwin

311. “I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.”

— James Baldwin

312. “I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?”

— James Baldwin

313. “I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.”

— James Baldwin

314. “In America, though, life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet. Just.”

— James Baldwin

315. “One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

— James Baldwin

316. “For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

— James Baldwin

317. “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”

— James Baldwin

318. “No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief.”

— James Baldwin

319. “You smiled at me the way you smiled at everyone, you told me what you told everyone – and you tell nothing but lies. What are you always hiding? And do you think I did not know when you made love to me, you were making love to no one? No one! Or everyone – but not me, certainly. I am nothing to you, nothing, and you bring me fever but no delight.”

— James Baldwin

320. “She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did not say any of this.”

— James Baldwin

321. “You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.”

— James Baldwin

322. “Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous – dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.”

— James Baldwin

323. “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.”

— James Baldwin

324. “If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.”

— James Baldwin

325. “He laughed. ‘Baby. Baby. Baby. I love you. And I’m going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks are going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.”

— James Baldwin

326. “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

327. “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs;.”

— James Baldwin

328. “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

329. “Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”

— James Baldwin

330. “I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

— James Baldwin

331. “Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.”

— James Baldwin

332. “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

333. “These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.”

— James Baldwin

334. “And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played – and play – in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The.”

— James Baldwin

335. “The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.”

— James Baldwin

336. “They say the kids are dumb and so they’re teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.”

— James Baldwin

337. “Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life.”

— James Baldwin

338. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.”

— James Baldwin

339. “The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”

— James Baldwin

340. “Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path.”

— James Baldwin

341. “All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.”

— James Baldwin

342. “There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds...”

— James Baldwin

343. “I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me.”

— James Baldwin

344. “The world should listen then, as I am listening now.”

— James Baldwin

345. “The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.”

— James Baldwin

346. “The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

348. “It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.”

— James Baldwin

349. “The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.”

— James Baldwin

350. “It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.”

— James Baldwin