James Baldwin Quotes

I can guide you if you feel blind, I just need you to be willing to journey into my ILL Mind.

It's not easy to be Light when you've been Dark. It's almost too much to ask anyone. -Macon Ravenwood

I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.

I think to be honest, that being is inside. I meet that being in so many people that I meet everywhere in the world and when I do meet that being, in other people, what I want to ask is "How do we keep opening ourselves so that we can become as vulnerable and as willing to live in the deepest complexity and ambiguity and truth that we can?

Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little - oh, I admit only a very little - of what life is about.

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

All of us are richer and more fascinating and more complex than we can ever know.

You traveled the world... Now you must journey inwards... to what you really fear... it's inside you.

real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.

Beautiful revelations of power are often written by the guy who got kicked around and didn’t have any power.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

Jon passes from Darkness to Light.

Welcome to those who believe in the power of dreams and who would like to join me in my exploration of life.

Whether a movie part comes to me or I seek it out, there's always this journey to darkness through light, or vice versa; that element has been in almost everything I've done.

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?

There's a part of you that you can get a hold of, and there's a part of you that you can never get a hold of, and those are opposite things. Who are you? Which one are you? You are combinations of opposites.

I don't want to be king, I want to be real.

Many of us are returning from a long journey during which we were forced to search for things that were of no interest to us. Now we realize that they were false. But this return cannot be made without pain, because we have been away for a long time and feel that we are strangers in out own land. It will take some time to find the friends who also left, and the places where our roots and treasures lie. But this will happen.

Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while.

If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.

The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being.

A man's dreams are a maze even he cannot know.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.