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Quotes About World

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
~ James Baldwin
After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.
~ James Baldwin
And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
~ James Baldwin
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
~ James Baldwin
The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
~ James Baldwin
the key to illusion is complicity. The world sees what it wishes to see: it does not wish to see who, or what, or why you are.
~ James Baldwin
But the conquest of the physical world is not man's only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
~ James Baldwin
The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
~ James Baldwin
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
~ James Baldwin
It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.
~ James Baldwin
Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously ragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance why this effort was so rare.
~ James Baldwin
Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world—so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention—and that they cannot possibly hope to rule it any longer. If this is so, why is it not also possible that they achieved their original dominance by stealth and cunning and bloodshed and in opposition to the will of Heaven, and not, as they claim, by Heaven's will?
~ James Baldwin
The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.
~ James Baldwin
To 'come along' meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom 'coming along' is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
~ James Baldwin
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.
~ James Baldwin
I had been well conditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously.
~ James Baldwin
That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That's how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwise you can't be sure if you're safe.
~ James Baldwin
The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world's present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and, finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.
~ James Baldwin
As pessoas que lembram correm o risco de enlouquecer de dor, a dor da morte de sua inocência, a recorrer eternamente; as que esquecem se arriscam a mergulhar em outra espécie de loucura, a loucura de negar a dor e odiar a inocência; e o mundo basicamente se divide entre loucos que lembram e loucos que esquecem.
~ James Baldwin
The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.
~ James Baldwin
and Rufus realized that he had not thought at all about this world and its power to hate and destroy.
~ James Baldwin
Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world — once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is — some of the self-protective veils between oneself and reality begin to fall away.
~ James Baldwin
All roles are dangerous. The world tends to trap and immobilize you in the role you play; and it is not always easy—in fact, it is always extremely hard—to maintain a kind of watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
~ James Baldwin
And if it's children you're after, well, you can do that in five minutes and you you haven't got to love anybody to do it. If all the children who get here every year were brought here by love, wow! baby, what a bright world this would be!
~ James Baldwin