James Baldwin Quotes

I hope it's enabling me to deal with another human being who's more important to me than I am.

You can't sing about love unless you know about it.

You get your heart stomped by the opposite sex, and you're hurting so badly that you write 'Sometimes When We Touch.' But then what happens when you've been married for 25 years? You can't rely on those emotional male-female roller coasters. You have to start using your imagination and the powers of empathy more.

In the graver and more sentimental communication of man and man, the head still bears the superior sway; in the unreserved intimacies of man and woman, the heart is ever uppermost. Feeling is the main thing, and judgment passes for little.

I don't believe people are interested in dates and facts. I don't think it is interesting to say what it is to be this person or that, but I do believe it is entertaining and perhaps even of value to express how it is to be that person.

If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality

We can only love what we know.

You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.

We can hear others, and we can travel with them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system, like so many leaves of grass. But the game makes me wonder wheter we can really ever fully become another.

Of all the needs that we have right now, more than anything we need a time for love.

I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

Love is a human experience, not a political statement.

I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen by them, heard by them, to be understood and touched by them.

I think compassion is important but love fizzles out eventually. But if there is compassion in a relationship, things can always be worked out.

I feel like songwriting is an experiment in empathy.

The royal road to a man's heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?

Eventually you love people - friends or lovers - because of their flaws.

I don't make romantic films. I make films about human relationships.

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

Love is about mutual respect, apart from attraction.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

To act, no matter how the character is, you have to love and have compassion for the character you're playing.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.