If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.


James Baldwin

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to wher...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where...
JAMES BALDWIN
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN
Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.
OMAR KHAYYAM
Long-time viewing of Internet violence tend to change a person's temperament, making the person pron...
YOU QUANXI
If positive and healthy materials are absent, negative materials are sure to be dominant in the cybe...
YOU QUANXI
In a robust global business environment, our business units operated well in the first quarter. More...
HARRY YOU
The Board of Directors and I are pleased to recognize Peter's outstanding contribution to the succes...
HARRY YOU
We are pleased to close the books on 2004 following the painstaking review of almost five years of f...
HARRY YOU
There is no limit to what you can achieve, if you believe you can.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare; tomorrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair: Drink! for you kn...
EDWARD FITZGERALD
There is no limit to what you can do.
Go forward and fulfil your dream.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
There is no limit to the good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.
GENERAL GEORGE CATLETT MARSHALL
Think of these things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Be yourself.
Become all that you want to be.
You should go as far as you can.
There i...
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.
RONALD REAGAN
There is no limit to what you can do, be determined!
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
There is no limit to what you can do,when you focus on your strength.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
If you don't know where you want to go, we will make sure you get there.
MICROSOFT SLOGAN TRANSLATED IN JAPANESE.
You can't change where you came from, but you can change where you go from here.
SARAH ADDISON ALLEN
Understand where it is you want to go. Then picture yourself there. If you can picture yourself ther...
CYNDI LAUPER
Always remember where you came from. So you can figure out where should you go.
WOHI PURANA
There is no limit to life. The only limit is the limit you put into life.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
There is no limit to how good you can get in pursuit of perfection.
SACHIN KUMAR PULI
There's no limit to how much you'll know, depending how far beyond zebra you go.
DR. SEUSS
There's no limit to how much you'll know, depending how far beyond zebra you go.
DR. SUESS
Damn you villains, who are you? And from whence came you?
EDWARD TEACH
There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there ...
ALICE MUNRO
If you don't know where you are going. How can you expect to get there?
BASIL S. WALSH
I've learned it's important not to limit yourself. You can do whatever you really love to do, no mat...
RYAN GOSLING
There's really no age limit when you out there in those streets.
YOUNG BUCK
Armed with a skill, there is no limit to what you can do or earn
SOTONYE ANGA
No matter where you came from, you can be inspired.
F. GARY GRAY
In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
E. L. DOCTOROW
There's really no age limit when you out there in those streets.
YOUNG BUCK
is there an age limit on education so there are no excuses to why you don't get the best education y...
DELESHA SHANTAE BUFORD
Many people have no destination in life and if you don’t know where you are going then any road ca...
SUNDAY ADELAJA
If you don't know where you are going any road can take you there
LEWIS CARROLL
You know he is their go-to guy. The ball is going to get to No. 81 some time or another. We know we ...
KIRK MORRISON
My job is to push him as far as I can and you only know what the limit is when you go past it someti...
BOB BOWMAN
Trust what you know; have faith in where you go; if there's no wind, row; or go with the flow.
ED PARRISH III
Little drops of rain Whisper of the pain Tears of love Lost in the days gone by.
ROBERT PLANT "THANK YOU"
No matter where you go, there you are,
YOGI BERRA
No matter where you go, there you are.
BUCKAROO BANZAI
No matter where you go - there you are
CONFUCIUS
Know your limitations on right and wrong decisions, but don't have a limit on how far you can go in ...
BENALEO
You can get something really really fabulous. I just tasted the Pol Roger Winston Churchill 1998 and...
JOE SCALICE
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for...
JAMES BALDWIN
If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?
BOETHIUS
Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
EARL MAC RAUCH
Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far...
MARY KAY ASH
On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and...
AYRTON SENNA
I've learned it's important not to limit yourself. You can do whatever you really love to do...
RYAN GOSLING
To think about your life is to create it. You have to take ownership of where you are right now and ...
ALI VINCENT
There is no substitute for a real location when you're trying to shoot the jungle. You can't...
RACHELLE LEFEVRE
When you start a scene, and you don't really know where you're going to go, that's a rol...
MARION COTILLARD
And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
EARL MAC RAUCH
Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as...
MARY KAY ASH
No one wants to go back to a situation where, if you have a pre-existing medical condition, you, you...
DAVID AXELROD
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I d...
ELLA FITZGERALD
You never know where the limit will be. These are sacred places and really shouldn't be opened to th...
ERIC ANTEBI
Seeding is everything when it comes to that tournament. Where you go and how they place you can real...
ADAM HALUSKA
I love you. There is no limit to what I can give to you, no time I need. Even when this world is for...
SARAH J. MAAS
No man can limit how far you can go in life,because no man can decipher the powers residing in your ...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest somepl...
AD REINHARDT
To know where you want to go, you must first know where you are.
KISHAN S CHAUHAN
There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if...
PHILIP DUNNE
Walking backwards is a lot like life. You can't really see where you going, only where you've been. ...
MATT MALDRE
If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your wo...
BRUCE LEE
Just don't give up on trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, ...
ELLA FITZGERALD
Racing here for me is muscle memory. Running at the limit is just kind of average. You are always tr...
PAUL NEWMAN
Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no o...
LES BROWN
Anything you really want, you can attain, if you really go after it.
WAYNE DYER
There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.
ROBERT WOODRUFF
I would like to restore, to the West, its genealogy, ... We have less and less history and it seems ...
THOMAS CAHILL
I don't know where else you can go to gobble chocolate until your heart's content. This is really bi...
BETHANY THOUIN
My contention is evolution kills people. It's not that evolutionists don't have morality, it's that ...
BILL JACK
When people say, 'You have Alzheimer's,' you have no idea what Alzheimer's is. You k...
NANCY REAGAN
There comes a point where you realize you no longer wish to be taken advantage if, it is you and onl...
N. S. COLE
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
I love you. There is no limit to what I can give to you, no time I need. Even when this world is a f...
SARAH J. MAAS
If you don't know where you want to go, then it doesn't matter which path you take.
LEWIS CARROLL
You can always plan where you think your life is going to go but I don't think you can really pl...
JACK MCCOLLOUGH
You are not likely to get anywhere in particular if you don't know where you want to go.
PERCY H. JOHNSON
Take the challenge of your life.
Reach out to your goals.
There is no limit to what you ca...
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
If there was no church I wouldn't know where to go.
CELESTE KEKOOLANI
All ways will lead and take you there as long as you know where you want to go.
OSCAR AULIQ-ICE
If you go on TV and say there's no other country in the world where you can be born poor and bec...
DAVID FRUM
Go where you will, if a shilling can there be procured, you may expect to meet with individuals in s...
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON
If you have fear of some pain or suffering, you should examine whether there is anything you can do ...
DALAI LAMA
If you have fear of some pain or suffering, you should examine whether there is anything you can do ...
DALAI LAMA XIV
If we want to make this world a better place. We need to change our selves first. If you know where ...
VICTOR WERNET
Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new ...
TERRY PRATCHETT
Sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you never know the end...
NEIL SIMON
You see it, don't you, James? Without Tessa there is nothing for me--no joy, no light, no life. I...
CASSANDRA CLARE
Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go,It is...
GUNDO MULAUDZI
If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?
STEVE MARABOLI
If you know where you are going, any road will get you there.
LEWIS CARROLL

More James Baldwin

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
JAMES BALDWIN
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and t...
JAMES BALDWIN
The future is like heaven. Everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
JAMES BALDWIN
The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. -James...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the i...
JAMES BALDWIN
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered ...
JAMES BALDWIN
People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and th...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN
The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself...
JAMES BALDWIN
The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea...
JAMES BALDWIN
The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the poin...
JAMES BALDWIN
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described...
JAMES BALDWIN
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that ...
JAMES BALDWIN
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
JAMES BALDWIN
When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I ...
JAMES BALDWIN
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the m...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
JAMES BALDWIN
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without mo...
JAMES BALDWIN
Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people ...
JAMES BALDWIN
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
JAMES BALDWIN
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we ...
JAMES BALDWIN
We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man...
JAMES BALDWIN
Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in...
JAMES BALDWIN
The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to e...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the inde...
JAMES BALDWIN
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES BALDWIN
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on...
JAMES BALDWIN
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other his...
JAMES BALDWIN
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wre...
JAMES BALDWIN
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience...
JAMES BALDWIN
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world...
JAMES BALDWIN
The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the pa...
JAMES BALDWIN
Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.
JAMES BALDWIN
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting...
JAMES BALDWIN
The future is... black.
JAMES BALDWIN
Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom...
JAMES BALDWIN
Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. Peop...
JAMES BALDWIN
James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no on...
JAMES BALDWIN
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze...
JAMES BALDWIN
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own e...
JAMES BALDWIN
Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.
JAMES BALDWIN
Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is...
JAMES BALDWIN
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
JAMES BALDWIN
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, ...
JAMES BALDWIN
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion...
JAMES BALDWIN
There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one ou...
JAMES BALDWIN
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themsel...
JAMES BALDWIN
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a s...
JAMES BALDWIN
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN
People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly si...
JAMES BALDWIN
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibilit...
JAMES BALDWIN
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES BALDWIN
Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and stre...
JAMES BALDWIN
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocu...
JAMES BALDWIN
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
JAMES BALDWIN
He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
JAMES BALDWIN
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immut...
JAMES BALDWIN
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN
For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their abili...
JAMES BALDWIN
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on th...
JAMES BALDWIN
Anyone who had ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Whose little boy are you?
JAMES BALDWIN
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN
There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are...
JAMES BALDWIN
To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how...
JAMES BALDWIN
Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's...
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are descr...
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be reall...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the arti...
JAMES BALDWIN
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also peopl...
JAMES BALDWIN
A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
JAMES BALDWIN
We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; a...
JAMES BALDWIN
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWIN
We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.
JAMES BALDWIN
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
JAMES BALDWIN
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where...
JAMES BALDWIN
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to thier hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES BALDWIN
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the In...
JAMES BALDWIN
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense...
JAMES BALDWIN
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossib...
JAMES BALDWIN
The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the dis...
JAMES BALDWIN
The first time I saw Reverend Shuttlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot o...
JAMES BALDWIN
To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior ar...
JAMES BALDWIN
The distance between us, and I had never thought of this before, was that they did not know this, an...
JAMES BALDWIN
Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two unde...
JAMES BALDWIN
People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to p...
JAMES BALDWIN
I remembered his older brother, who had died in Sicily, in battle for the free world- he had barely ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is ...
JAMES BALDWIN
All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that th...
JAMES BALDWIN
It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was...
JAMES BALDWIN
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves ...
JAMES BALDWIN
I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fi...
JAMES BALDWIN
I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.
JAMES BALDWIN
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their...
JAMES BALDWIN
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever di...
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current a...
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are...
JAMES BALDWIN
People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than th...
JAMES BALDWIN
With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
JAMES BALDWIN
I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.
JAMES BALDWIN
Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed onl...
JAMES BALDWIN
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not re...
JAMES BALDWIN
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to...
JAMES BALDWIN
[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simpl...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are...
JAMES BALDWIN
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the indepen...
JAMES BALDWIN
The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, b...
JAMES BALDWIN
Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it
JAMES BALDWIN
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impass...
JAMES BALDWIN
In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word...
JAMES BALDWIN
But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the s...
JAMES BALDWIN
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be JAMES BALDWIN The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to ex...
JAMES BALDWIN
If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory pl...
JAMES BALDWIN
And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.
JAMES BALDWIN
The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization...
JAMES BALDWIN
Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents,...
JAMES BALDWIN
I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked...
JAMES BALDWIN
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, f...
JAMES BALDWIN
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that ga...
JAMES BALDWIN
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES BALDWIN
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do bo...
JAMES BALDWIN
It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really...
JAMES BALDWIN
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Da...
JAMES BALDWIN
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I w...
JAMES BALDWIN
I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we di...
JAMES BALDWIN
Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so muc...
JAMES BALDWIN
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect...
JAMES BALDWIN
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN
It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one...
JAMES BALDWIN
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, ...
JAMES BALDWIN
In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be for...
JAMES BALDWIN
Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
JAMES BALDWIN
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even ...
JAMES BALDWIN
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human li...
JAMES BALDWIN
No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another....
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN
I have met only a very few people - and most of these were not Americans - who had any real desire t...
JAMES BALDWIN
To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past ca...
JAMES BALDWIN
There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN
When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now...
JAMES BALDWIN
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by dro...
JAMES BALDWIN
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for...
JAMES BALDWIN
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which...
JAMES BALDWIN
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN
how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live...
JAMES BALDWIN
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immu...
JAMES BALDWIN
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
JAMES BALDWIN
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use t...
JAMES BALDWIN
But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began sear...
JAMES BALDWIN
People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by gi...
JAMES BALDWIN
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or sh...
JAMES BALDWIN
You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look a...
JAMES BALDWIN
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWIN
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the...
JAMES BALDWIN
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The ...
JAMES BALDWIN
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES A. BALDWIN