Looking for the best and inspirational James Baldwin quotes?
James Baldwin was an influential writer and public intellectual of the 20th century. He had a keen sense of social injustice, racial inequality, and economic inequality. His essays, novels, plays, and non-fiction are still widely read today.
He was born in Harlem on August 2nd, 1926, to a middle-class family. Baldwin’s father emigrated from Berwick-upon-Tweed in England, while his mother emigrated from Jamaica in 1906. The family remained prominent members of the African American community in Harlem for many years.
Baldwin attended De Witt Clinton High School. He started writing short stories and later left to participate in New York University’s journalism school for one year before dropping out to focus on writing full time.
Check out some of his quotes so you can see the brighter side of humanity.
113 Greatest James Baldwin Quotes
“You write in order to change the world. If you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”
“When a dark face opens, light seems to go everywhere.”
“Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.”
“If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.”
“The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.”
“True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life”
“The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”
“People can cry much easier than they can change.”
“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”
“If the word integration means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it”
“Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.”
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
“You can’t see yourself all over. But I can. Part of you is honey, part of you is copper, some of you is gold.”
“Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
“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.”
“The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.”
“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.”
“Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.”
“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.”
“Ordinary things are behind a talent; discipline, love, luck, but above all – patience.”
“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.”
“If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”
“A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.”
“I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?”
“I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”
“One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself – that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.”
“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.”
“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
“It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it – the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress – from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.”
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
“Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”
“It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”
“Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?”
“You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
“True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers, and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.”
“But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.”
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
“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.”
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. The history of the world, but then you read. 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, who had ever been alive.”
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
“To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.”
“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”
“When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.”
“Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.”
“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.”
“People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say ‘Yes’ to life.”
“There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”
“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.”
“The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you.”
“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
“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.”
“I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.”
“The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
“The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.”
“The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.”
“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”
“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
“And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in silence which was music from everywhere.”
“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.”
“What a great difference there is,’ she said, ‘between dreaming of something and dealing with it!”
“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.”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead – turns himself into a monster.”
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters.”
“The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.”
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
“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.”
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”
“The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then di – which was to hide.”
“I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?”
“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.”
“A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.”
“Great art can only be created out of love.”
“I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.”
“Painters have often taught writers how to see.”
“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”
“People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.”
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
“Every human being is an unprecedented miracle.”
“A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.”
“The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society.”
“I think you’ve got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there’s no possibility of achieving the life you want.”
“One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found—and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is.”
“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.”
“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.”
“Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
“This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
“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.”
“It is your responsibility to change the society if you think yourself as an educated person.”
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
“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.”
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”
“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.”
“We’re all bastards. That’s why we need our friends.”
“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.”
“You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”
“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all that you need to know.”
“The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.”
