Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
James A. Baldwin
Kids
Models
Imitate
Children
Teaching
Elders
Good
Listening
Listeners
Never
Parent
Imitation
Education
Parenting
Wisdom
Failed
Family
Educational
Imitator
Culture
Diversity
Imitating
More quotes by James A. Baldwin
Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
James A. Baldwin
I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.
James A. Baldwin
We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
James A. Baldwin
Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.
James A. Baldwin
It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
James A. Baldwin
I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.
James A. Baldwin
Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
James A. Baldwin
The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
James A. Baldwin
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
James A. Baldwin
To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced.
James A. Baldwin
You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.
James A. Baldwin
The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
James A. Baldwin
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
James A. Baldwin
Employment is my right my destiny.
James A. Baldwin
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.
James A. Baldwin
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
James A. Baldwin
When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
James A. Baldwin
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
James A. Baldwin
It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
James A. Baldwin
Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
James A. Baldwin
