45 James Baldwin quotes about life, liberty and love

James Baldwin quotes on life, freedom, education, love and other subjects.

James Baldwin was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist.

Baldwin was born in New York in 1924. He had a difficult childhood, growing up in poverty and spending much of his early years caring for his younger siblings.

As a young James Baldwin he discovered his passion for writing, and in 1937, at the age of 13, he wrote his first article entitled Harlem Then and Now, which was published in his school journal.

At the age of 24, James Baldwin moved to Paris. In 1970 he settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, where he died in 1987.

James Baldwin quotes

A collection of James Baldwin quotes on life, liberty, education, love and other subjects.

“Unfortunately, people cannot invent their docks, their lovers, and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives and takes away, and the great difficulty is saying yes to life.”

“Accepting your past, your history, is not the same as drowning in it. It learns how to use it. A made-up past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressure of life like clay in a time of drought.”

“I think people should do what they want to do, what else are they living for?”

“People who treat other people less than human should not be surprised if the bread they threw in the water swims back to them poisoned.”

“You have to say yes to life and embrace it wherever you find it – and it’s in terrible places; nevertheless it is there.”

“Nothing is more unbearable, once you have it, than freedom.”

“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others who are.”

“I can imagine that one of the reasons people hold on to their hate so tenaciously is that they feel that once the hate is gone, they will be forced to confront pain.”

“Just at the point where you start developing a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society.”

“Our crown is already bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.”

“People pay for what they do and even more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they simply pay for it; after the life they lead.”

“Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

“People who close their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns into a monster.”

James Baldwin quotes on life and liberty

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

“The price one pays for having a job or a calling is knowing its ugly side well.”

“Money, it turned out, was just like sex. You thought of nothing else when you didn’t have it, and thought of other things when you had it.”

“It took me many years to throw up all the filth I was taught and half believed about myself before I was able to walk the earth like I had a right to be here .”

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us bigger, freer, and more loving.”

“An artist is a kind of emotional or spiritual historian. His job is to make you aware of the doom and glory of who you are and what you are. He has to tell because no one else can tell what it’s like to be alive.”

“It’s true that two wrongs don’t make a right, as we like to point out to the people we’ve wronged. But a mistake is not a mistake either.”

“You don’t realize you’re smart until it gets you in trouble.”

More quotes from James Baldwin

“Maybe home isn’t a place, it’s just an irrevocable condition.”

“Please try to remember that what they believe, what they do, and what they make you endure is not a testament to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity.”

“The purpose of education is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for themselves and make their own decisions.”

“I can’t believe what you’re saying because I see what you’re doing.”

“Trust life and it will teach you everything you need to know in joy and sorrow.”

“You must walk the path your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live another life, you won’t live any life at all.”

“All I know about music is that not many people ever really listen to it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something inside opens up and the music comes in, we mostly hear personal, private, vanishing incantations or hear confirmed incantations.”

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”

“Not everything you face can be changed, but nothing can be changed until you face it.”

“Neither love nor terror is blind; Indifference makes blind.”

“There are so many ways to be despicable that it makes your head spin. But the way to be truly despicable is to despise other people’s pain.”

“I can imagine that one of the reasons people hold on to their hate so tenaciously is that they feel that once the hate is gone, they will be forced to confront pain.”

“You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to all people who lived, who ever lived.”

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

“You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not their idea of ​​you.”

“If the word ‘integration’ means anything, it means that with love we will force our brothers to see themselves for who they are, to stop fleeing from reality and to start changing it.”

“In any case, it is certain that ignorance coupled with power is the cruellest enemy that justice can have.”

“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”

James Baldwin quotes about love

“I love America more than any other country in the world, and for that very reason I insist on the right to constantly criticize it.”

“Love doesn’t begin and end the way we think it does. Love is a fight, love is a war, love is a growing up.”

“Be careful what you put your heart on – it will surely be yours.”

“I am using the word ‘love’ here not only in a personal sense, but as a state of being or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the harsh and universal sense of seeking and daring growth.”

“Love takes off masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live in.”

“It’s a miracle to realize someone loves you.”

James Baldwin quotes

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