James Baldwin Quotes

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but fear I must.

To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.

African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.

Schultz: You must speak.
Jewish barber: I can't.
Schultz: It's our only hope.

I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another.

For this too is a very pleasant strand woven into the Cynic's pattern of life; he must needs be flogged like an ass, and while he is being flogged he must love the men who flog him, as though he were the father or brother of them all.

?It’ pretty hard for the Lord to guide you if you haven’t made up your mind which way to go.”

Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ's word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains.

It is that wind it is that voice buzzing it is whispering and whistling in the wires miles upon miles upon miles on the wires in the wind in the subway track in the rolling road in the not silent bush it is the voice of the noise here it comes the Third World Express they must say, here we go again.

The opposite of work is idleness. But very few of us know what to do with idleness. When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time. And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health.

Out of love, God becomes man. He says: Here you see what it is to be a human being; but he adds: Take care, for I am also God — blessed is he who takes no offense at me.

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.

I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.