35 Inspirational James Baldwin Quotes On Success

James Baldwin was an American novelist, playwright, and activist. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son, explore many intricacies and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America. Some of Baldwin’s essays are book-length, including The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Devil Finds Work. An unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, was expanded and adapted for cinema as the Academy Award-nominated documentary film I Am Not Your Negro. One of his novels, If Beale Street Could Talk, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning dramatic film in 2018. May these James Baldwin Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

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

2. “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

3. “The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then di – which was to hide.” James Baldwin

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

5. “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

6. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. The history of the world, but then you read. 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, who had ever been alive.” James Baldwin

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

8. “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” James Baldwin

9. “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

10. “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” James Baldwin

11. “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” James Baldwin

12. “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” James Baldwin

13. “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

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

15. “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

16. “And, here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.” James Baldwin

17. “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 Baldwin

18. “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

19. “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” James Baldwin

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

21. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.” James Baldwin

22. “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

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

24. “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead – turns himself into a monster.” James Baldwin

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

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

27. “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

28. “True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers, and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.” James Baldwin

29. “I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.” James Baldwin

30. “I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” James Baldwin

31. “Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all that you need to know.” James Baldwin

32. “Every human being is an unprecedented miracle.” James Baldwin

33. “Ordinary things are behind a talent; discipline, love, luck, but above all – patience.” James Baldwin

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

35. “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

I hope you enjoyed these James Baldwin Quotes On Success. Do let us know which one was your favorite in the comments section below.

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