Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
AUTHOR QUOTES
Quotes by James A. Baldwin
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to James A. Baldwin. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
EXPLORE BY TOPIC
Selected quotes by James A. Baldwin
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.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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.
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
It is certain, in any case, that 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.
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.
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.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
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.
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.
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.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
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.
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.
More quotes attributed to James A. Baldwin are available across the Mayalines library.
Related author collections
Explore authors represented in the same topics.