Quote

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

James A. Baldwin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James A. Baldwin
Luck
Discipline
Beyond
Talent
Endurance
Lying
Insignificant
Happiness
Talented
Words
Usual
Love
Ruins

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

Image
Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
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
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
Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
James A. Baldwin
Image
I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
James A. Baldwin
Image
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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
Image
Artists are here to disturb the peace.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
James A. Baldwin
Image
A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Tell me, he said, What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for? Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel. And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?
James A. Baldwin
Image
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James A. Baldwin
Image
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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
Image
There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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