Quotes by James Baldwin

He was sobbing, it would have been said, as though his heart would break.

The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only,One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

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.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

If you cannot love me, I will be loved.

To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.

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 can't do that, it's time we got rid of Him.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

It is experience which shapes a person, and the peculiar experience of the Negro in America which gives him a particular insight into the problems which torment the world.

The young think they can change the world, which is true, but they can't change it without the old.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.

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.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also much more than that. So are we all.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

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

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

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.

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

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

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.

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

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.