James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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.
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When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
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The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
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When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
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Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
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To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.
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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.
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Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.