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Acceptance
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Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
-James Baldwin
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America
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.
-James Baldwin
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Anger
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Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.
-James Baldwin
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Art
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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.
-James Baldwin
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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.
-James Baldwin
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Authors & Writing
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
-James Baldwin
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
-James Baldwin
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Belief
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Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
-James Baldwin
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We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
-James Baldwin
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Career, Vocation
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.
-James Baldwin
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Change
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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.
-James Baldwin
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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
-James Baldwin
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
-James Baldwin
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Charity
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It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
-James Baldwin
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Children
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There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
-James Baldwin
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
-James Baldwin
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Christianity
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Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.
-James Baldwin
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Conformity & Nonconformity
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The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
-James Baldwin
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Control
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He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
-James Baldwin
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Death
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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
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Desires
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Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.
-James Baldwin
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Education
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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.
-James Baldwin
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It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
-James Baldwin
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
-James Baldwin
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Enthusiasm
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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.
-James Baldwin
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Books by and about James Baldwin