James Baldwin Quotes

• Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

  James Baldwin

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

  James Baldwin

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

  James Baldwin

• Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

  James Baldwin

• Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty – necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

  James Baldwin

• I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than the natural state.

  James Baldwin

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

  James Baldwin

• 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.

  James Baldwin

• I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

  James Baldwin

• The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Failure

• The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Art

• Not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour–and in the oddest places!–for the lack of it.

  James Baldwin

• When the book comes out it may hurt you – but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

  James Baldwin

• Not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour–and in the oddest places!–for the lack of it.

  James Baldwin

• There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

  James Baldwin

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

  James Baldwin

• 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

• The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Power

• When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

  James Baldwin

• Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

  James Baldwin

  Topics in Society

James Baldwin (106)

Birth:	2nd August, 1924
Death:	1987
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Essayist, Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Screenwriter

About

James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, New York, USA. He was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, activist and social critic. He wrote several books include: Go Tell It on the Mountain(Semi-autobiographical novel), The Amen Corner(play), Notes of a Native Son(essays), Giovanni's Room(novel), Nobody Knows My Name(essays), Another Country(novel), The Fire Next Time(essays), Blues for Mister Charlie(play), Going to Meet the Man(Short stories), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone(novel), No Name in the Street(essays), If Beale Street Could Talk(novel), The Devil Finds Work(essay), Just Above My Head(novel), Jimmy's Blues(poem), The Evidence of Things Not Seen(essays), The Price of the Ticket(essays), Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems, A Rap on Race(with Margaret Mead), A Dialogue(with Nikki Giovanni), and Little Man Little Man(children's novel). He wrote several films include: Go Tell It on the Mountain(TV film), Where the Heart Is, and I Am Not Your Negro(nominated- Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature).

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