50 James Baldwin Quotes To Make You Conscious 2024

1. “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” — James Baldwin

2. “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.” — James Baldwin

3. You cannot fix what you will not face.” — James Baldwin

4. “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.” — James Baldwin

5. “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” — James Baldwin

6. “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” — James Baldwin

7. “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.” — James Baldwin

8. “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” — James Baldwin

9. “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” — James Baldwin

10. “The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.” — James Baldwin

11. “The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings.” — James Baldwin

12. “Whenever we encounter him in the flesh, our faith is made perfect and his necessary and bloody end is executed with a mystical ferocity of joy.” — James Baldwin

13. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” — James Baldwin

14. “Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?” — James Baldwin

15. “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up” — James Baldwin

16. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin

17. “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” — James Baldwin

18. “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” — James Baldwin

19. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.” — James Baldwin

20. “People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.” — James Baldwin

21. “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.” — James Baldwin

22. “People can cry much easier than they can change.” — James Baldwin

23.“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” — James Baldwin

24. “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” — James Baldwin

25. “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” — James Baldwin

26. “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.” — James Baldwin

27. “It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.” — James Baldwin

28. “Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.” — James Baldwin

29. “Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.” — James Baldwin

30. “You write in order to change the world … if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” — James Baldwin

31. “There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.” — James Baldwin

32. “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.” — James Baldwin

33. “Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.” — James Baldwin

34. “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.” — James Baldwin

35. “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” — James Baldwin

36. “Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.” — James Baldwin

37. “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” — James Baldwin

38. “You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.” — James Baldwin

39. “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.” — James Baldwin

40. “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.” — James Baldwin

41. “If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.” — James Baldwin

42. “Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” — James Baldwin

43. “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” — James Baldwin

44. “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.” — James Baldwin

45. “Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.” — James Baldwin

46. “Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.” — James Baldwin

47. “How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?” — James Baldwin

48. “History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.” — James Baldwin

49. “I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.” — James Baldwin

50. “When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.” — James Baldwin