Quotes from James Baldwin

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

Sin is the only heritage of the natural man...

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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.

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

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

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

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

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 questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

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.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

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.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

I do a lot of rewriting. It's very painful.