James Baldwin Quotes.
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.
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.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
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 price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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.
The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.
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.
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
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.
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
