James Baldwin Quotes for the love of freedom, compassion and to get a bit more closer to humanity. James Baldwin Quote the best moments of our life through his poetry.
Born in the mid-Twentieth-century (1924), James Baldwin was a famous novelist, a playwright, wrote essays, and a social critic too.
He wrote about racial inequality, injustice, humanity and became an important voice through his passionate writings.
James Baldwin’s writings as a Gay Black in America, when racial inequality was pretty much everywhere, inspired many famous novels, poems, and stories against racial discrimination.
James Baldwin Quotes are still relevant to this data, like when the Black Lives Matter movement happened, which was fighting against racial injustice as well.
We have curated a beautiful collection of Quotes from James Baldwin, that will ignite the flame of justice in your heart and bring you more closer to humanity.
Short James Baldwin Quotes
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unequalled in the history of the world, but then you read.
The most dangerous creation of any society is a man who has nothing to lose.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
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?
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
We’re all bastards. That’s why we need our friends.
What a great difference there is,’ she said, ‘between dreaming of something and dealing with it!
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Most Powerful James Baldwin Quotes
On Black Americans:
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
On ignorance:
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
On oppression:
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
On rejecting victimhood:
Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.
On hate:
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.
On love:
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
On justice:
If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony.
On learning:
It is true that the more one learns the less one knows.
On his sexuality:
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.
On disrespect:
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.
On America:
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
White people are trapped in a history they don’t understand” and “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have
Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
For he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
Painters have often taught writers how to see.
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James Baldwin Quotes On Changing
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.
The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.
You write in order to change the world … if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
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James Baldwin Quotes On Love & Affection
It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
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.
Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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.
And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs– as who has not?– of human love, God’s love alone is left.
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
Great art can only be created out of love.
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
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James Baldwin Quotes On Life
If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.
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.
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
The world’s definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one’s family, friends, or lovers – to say nothing of one’s children – to live according to the world’s definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
Inspirational James Baldwin Quotes
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.
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
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.
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
James Baldwin Quotes – Intelligence
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in silence which was music from everywhere.
When a dark face opens, light seems to go everywhere.
The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you.
If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad.
I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?
Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters.
People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.
James Baldwin Quotes for Living
You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.
To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.
The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.
I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?
The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found—and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.
It is your responsibility to change the society if you think yourself as an educated person.
You can’t see yourself all over. But I can. Part of you is honey, part of you is copper, some of you is gold.
Books taught me that things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to everyone who is alive and who had ever been alive.
People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.
One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself – that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.
James Baldwin Quotes – eye opening
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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 future is like heaven – everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
If you’re afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
If you’re afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
Other James Baldwin Quotes and Sayings
In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
Which are your favorite James Baldwin quotes
James Baldwin experienced childhood in neediness and was exposed to segregation and misuse. All things considered, he rose to the highest point of his game and was viewed as an exceptionally sagacious, famous author.
Even though he died in 1987, James Baldwin’s incredible words actually reverberate with a lot of the present society. Ideally, these quotes have propelled you to discover a way, unendingly, to be more grounded and better.
Did you partake in these James Baldwin quotes? Which of the quotes was your top choice? We couldn’t imagine anything better than to hear about it in the remark segment beneath.