James Baldwin Quotes Page 2

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

“Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.”

“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.”

“No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”

“No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.”

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

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

“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”

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

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

“People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears ? not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.”

“The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.”

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

“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.”

“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.”

“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.”