Quote

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

James A. Baldwin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James A. Baldwin
Must
Stable
Assume
Assuming
Heaven
Society
Artist
Nothing

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

Image
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James A. Baldwin
Image
But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament it was a matter of punishment and grief.
James A. Baldwin
Image
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
James A. Baldwin
Image
It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
James A. Baldwin
Image
One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
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
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
Image
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
James A. Baldwin
Image
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
James A. Baldwin
Image
In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
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
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James A. Baldwin