Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did. "

James A. Baldwin

Related Quotes:

" The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide. "

James A. Baldwin

" Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? "

James A. Baldwin

" 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 A. Baldwin

" Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law. "

James A. Baldwin

" 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 A. Baldwin

" When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living. "

James A. Baldwin

" When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking. "

James A. Baldwin

" Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. "

James A. Baldwin

" 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. "

James A. Baldwin

" The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever. "

James A. Baldwin

" Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks. "

James A. Baldwin

" There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now. "

James A. Baldwin

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

James A. Baldwin

" I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all. "

James A. Baldwin

" Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it. "

James A. Baldwin

" The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions. "

James A. Baldwin

" Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned. "

James A. Baldwin

" Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. "

James A. Baldwin

" The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. "

James A. Baldwin

" It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. "

James A. Baldwin

" I want to be an honest man and a good writer. "

James A. Baldwin

" 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 making of bread. "

James A. Baldwin

" It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. "

James A. Baldwin

" The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all. "

James A. Baldwin

" 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 A. Baldwin

" To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. "

James A. Baldwin

" The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment. "

James A. Baldwin

" Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black. "

James A. Baldwin

" 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 A. Baldwin

" Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. "

James A. Baldwin