Quotes from James A. Baldwin

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

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.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.

Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

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 breaking of bread.

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.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.

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

The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.