Top 60 James Earl Jones Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.”

— James Earl Jones

Featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Quotes About Heart, Quotes About Reality

2. “You don’t build a bond without being present.”

— James Earl Jones

3. “The one constant in life is baseball.”

— James Earl Jones

4. “There is a very fine line between love and nausea.”

— James Earl Jones

5. “Don’t you try and go through life worried if someone had liked you or not. You best make sure that they are doing right by you.”

— James Earl Jones

6. “If you expect someone else to guide you, you’ll be lost.”

— James Earl Jones

7. “Love is just love, it can never be explained.”

— James Earl Jones

8. “More and more, when I single out the person out who inspired me most, I go back to my grandfather.”

— James Earl Jones

9. “I found my voice in books...”

— James Earl Jones

10. “Your own need to be shines out of any dream or creation you imagine.”

— James Earl Jones

11. “I consider myself a novice film actor.”

— James Earl Jones

12. “A man’s got to take care of his family. You live in my house, you sleep your behind on my bedclothes, you put my food in your belly because you are my son; you are my flesh and blood, not because I like you. It is my duty to take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you.”

— James Earl Jones

13. “Just so you know, there’s a space that only you can fill. Just so you know, I loved you then, I guess I always will.”

— James Earl Jones

14. “Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I’d try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.”

— James Earl Jones

15. “I was an adopted child of my grandparents, and I don’t know how I can ever express my gratitude for that, because my parents would have been a mess, you know.”

— James Earl Jones

16. “The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will loose.”

— James Earl Jones

17. “When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.”

— James Earl Jones

18. “I think the extent to which I have any balance at all, any mental balance, is because of being a farm kid and being raised in those isolated rural areas.”

— James Earl Jones

19. “I agree with my father, Albert Einstein, don’t believe every quote you read on the internet.”

— James Earl Jones

20. “Trying to make someone fall in love with you is about as pointless as trying to control who you fall in love with.”

— James Earl Jones

21. “Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.”

— James Earl Jones

22. “My grandmother though, began to prepare in her own neurotic – and I think psychotic – way to face racism. So she taught us to be racist, which is something I had to undo later when I got to Michigan, you know.”

— James Earl Jones

23. “No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement.”

— James Earl Jones

24. “I mean, my people were very, very simple. They were peasant people, you know?”

— James Earl Jones

25. “So in my sophomore year, I took a senior anatomy class. I thought anatomy – being the thing that I should be most interested in – and if I could hack, as we called it, a senior class, I would continue. I didn’t hack the senior class.”

— James Earl Jones

26. “My voice is for hire. My endorsement is not for hire. I will do a voice-over, but I cannot endorse without making a different kind of commitment. My politics are very personal and subjective.”

— James Earl Jones

27. “Love was just a word to me. Until you came along and gave it meaning.”

— James Earl Jones

28. “There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.”

— James Earl Jones

29. “Even during the rationing period, during World War II, we didn’t have the anxiety that we’d starve, because we grew our own potatoes, you know? And our own hogs, and our own cows and stuff, you know.”

— James Earl Jones

30. “If you live in an oppressive society, you’ve got to be resilient. You can’t let each little thing crush you. You have take every encounter and make yourself larger, rather than allow yourself to be diminished by it.”

— James Earl Jones

31. “Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn’t cut it.”

— James Earl Jones

32. “In the wintertime, in the snow country, citrus fruit was so rare, and if you got one, it was better than ambrosia.”

— James Earl Jones

33. “My youngest uncle Randy and I were the first members of our entire family to ever go to college.”

— James Earl Jones

34. “So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn’t talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.”

— James Earl Jones

35. “The inclusiveness of the Drama League luncheon is one of the most exciting things about it. I get to see old friends and meet new friends. Of course I can’t tell who anybody is if they’re under the age of 75. So my old friends become my new friends.”

— James Earl Jones

36. “I think stutterers are funny. And I know it’s rude and politically incorrect to laugh at stutterers. But I think it is okay because I know why they’re funny. They make people nervous. People think, when on earth are they going to get the word out, so they start laughing out of their own nervousness.”

— James Earl Jones

37. “Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.”

— James Earl Jones

38. “You weren’t going to the theatre to change the world, but you had a chance to affect the world, the thinking and the feelings of the world.”

— James Earl Jones

39. “Before my grandpa built his own church, we went to the neighboring town, and it was a white community. You know, up north, mostly middle European people and Indians, Chippewa Indians. We were welcome to that church, but once we got in, they didn’t know what to do with us.”

— James Earl Jones

40. “I don’t ever want to be a sentimentalist. I prefer to be a realist. I’m not a romantic really.”

— James Earl Jones

41. “We used to be “shiftless and lazy,” now we’re “fearsome and awesome.” I think the black man should take pride in that.”

— James Earl Jones

42. “So I was determined to use my last two years in college doing something I thought I would enjoy, which was acting. And it was probably because there was girls over in the drama school too, you know?”

— James Earl Jones

43. “I really think I ambled through a lot of my life, or ambled from one thing to the other.”

— James Earl Jones

44. “Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.”

— James Earl Jones

45. “Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.”

— James Earl Jones

46. “People who lusted after Marilyn Monroe had no idea she stuttered. It is the secret of her sexiness, actually.”

— James Earl Jones

47. “I got out of the Army – in my world – I came to New York, for instance, when the civil rights movement was just beginning, and that created a certain energy, a certain rumble, a certain impetus for black actors.”

— James Earl Jones

48. “I was as content Off-Broadway as I was in a big Hollywood movie, and, I just try to be content wherever I am, you know.”

— James Earl Jones

49. “It has to be real, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don’t acknowledge that family is important, and it has to be people who are present, you know, and mothers and fathers, both are not present enough with children.”

— James Earl Jones

50. “The goal wasn’t to be a millionaire or to be a Hollywood star. That was not the goal. The goal was something about – the goal was to find the goal, but I knew where it was.”

— James Earl Jones