Explore Quotes by James A. Baldwin

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.

Great art can only be created out of love.

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him-he may be forced to-but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.

The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

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

Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

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.

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

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.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

Hatred destroys the person who hates.

People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.

Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.