James Baldwin: Trending quotes

James Baldwin trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
James Baldwin: 326   quotes 83   likes

“It's no credit to this enormously rich country that there are more oppressive, less decent governments elsewhere. We claim superiority of our institutions. We ought to live up to our own standards, not use misery elsewhere as an endless source of self-gratification and justification. Of course, people tell me all the time in the West that they are trying, they are trying hard. Some have tears in their eyes and let me know how awful they feel about the way our poor live, our blacks, or those in dozens of other countries. People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.”

James Baldwin

As quoted in "James Baldwin Back Home" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-home.html by Robert Coles in The New York Times (31 July 1977)

People , Way , Feeling , Tear

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”

James Baldwin If Beale Street Could Talk

Source: If Beale Street Could Talk

Love , Indifference

“Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”

James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time

Source: The Fire Next Time

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.”

James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time

Source: "Letter from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker (17 November 1962); republished as "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in The Fire Next Time (1963)
Context: 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 cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

Love , God

“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.”

James Baldwin book No Name in the Street

No Name in the Street (1972)

People

“One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found - and it is found in terrible places.”

James Baldwin

From Nothing Personal, a collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon (1964). Baldwin's text for the volume can be found " here https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=cibs".
Context: One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found - and it is found in terrible places. … For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Life

“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, which is the only fact we have.”

James Baldwin

"Letter from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker (17 November 1962); republished as "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in The Fire Next Time (1963)

Death , Beauty

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be”

James Baldwin
People , Freedom

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

James Baldwin
Pain , World , History , Thinking

“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.”

James Baldwin

"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" in Esquire (May 1961)

Money , Sex

“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.”

James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time

"Me and My House" in Harper's (November 1955); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Source: The Fire Next Time

Hurtful , Pain , Hate , People
James Baldwin quote: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

James Baldwin
Family , For Parents , Children

“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.”

James Baldwin book Nobody Knows My Name

"In Search of a Majority: An Address" (Feb 1960); reprinted in Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobody_Knows_My_Name (1961)

love , Wise , Relationship , Cute

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

James Baldwin

"As Much Truth As One Can Bear" in The New York Times Book Review (14 January 1962); republished in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2011), edited by Randall Kenan<!-- , also quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 114 -->
Context: Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. … Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

Powerful , Change

“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.”

James Baldwin
Love , Lovers