Quote

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

James A. Baldwin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James A. Baldwin
Left
Dreadful
Others
Dealing
Human
Eyes
Humans
Literature
Nothing
Attention
Going
Help
Things
Eye
Men
Helping
Flees

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

Image
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
James A. Baldwin
Image
You don't need numbers you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
James A. Baldwin
Image
You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Society is held together by our need we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
James A. Baldwin
Image
If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Not only was I not born to be a slave I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
James A. Baldwin
Image
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. 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 A. Baldwin
Image
The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
James A. Baldwin
Image
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James A. Baldwin