James Baldwin Life Quotes

#1. Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

James Baldwin

#2. A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.

James Baldwin

#3. Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.

James A. Baldwin

#4. Time is always now. Everybody who has ever thought about his own life knows this. You don't make resolutions about something you are going to do next year. No! You decide to write a book: the book may be finished twenty years from now, but you've got to start it now.

James Baldwin

#5. If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

James A. Baldwin

#6. We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

James Baldwin

#7. After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.

James Baldwin

#8. No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

James Baldwin

#9. 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 breaking of bread.

James Baldwin

#10. I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

James A. Baldwin

#11. I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had no meaning.

James Baldwin

#12. In this endeavor to wed the vision of the Old World with that of the New, it is the writer, not the statesman, who is our strongest arm. Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

James Baldwin

#13. Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

James Baldwin

#14. Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. - James Baldwin

Roland Merullo

#15. Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

James Baldwin

#16. The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

James Baldwin

#17. 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.

James Baldwin

#18. Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

James A. Baldwin

#19. To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first ... acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are [;] ... the second ... that one must never, in one's life, accept ... injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.

James Baldwin

#20. She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.

James A. Baldwin

#21. I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

James A. Baldwin

#22. True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life

James Baldwin

#23. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it bring must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.

James Baldwin

#24. To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

James Baldwin

#25. And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.

James Baldwin

#26. You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

James Baldwin

#27. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played - and play - in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The

James Baldwin

#28. Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

James Baldwin

#29. [Art is] very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

James Baldwin

#30. It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

James A. Baldwin

#31. The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead. "I'm going, Ma," she said. "I got to go.

James Baldwin

#32. One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found - and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is.

James Baldwin

#33. Our humanity is our burden, our life. We need not battle for it. We need only to do what is infinitely more difficult: that is, accept it.

James Baldwin

#34. But 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. I

James Baldwin

#35. Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.

James Baldwin

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

James Baldwin

#37. To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

James A. Baldwin

#38. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.

James Baldwin

#39. All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.

James Mark Baldwin

#40. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.

James A. Baldwin

#41. It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life
without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.

James A. Baldwin

#42. I do a lot of rewriting. It's very painful.

James Baldwin

#43. In America, though, life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet. Just

James Baldwin

#44. Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

James Baldwin

#45. I understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat. I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni's, must first become a part of Giovanni's room.

James Baldwin