James Baldwin Quotes

Few things are more agreeable than the spectacle of a man who loses his temper; we should be grateful to such people for providing us with moments of often unsullied delight.

We build our personalities laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes just because we might value their utility; no button reading "positive attitude" protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into immediate action by a single and painless pressing.

I think acting has made me very in tune with human behavior and myself as well.

I believe, when in my behavior or in relationships or in the way I react to something, that I'm still dealing with some leftover stuff from my childhood, but the good thing is now, because I have learned so much from the Bible, I can tell when I'm behaving wrong and when I'm not, and it doesn't take me very long to realize that's out of fear, or that's because I was controlled as a child, and I can make a conscious decision to behave the way I know I should behave.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

The truth is that we can overhaul our surroundings, renovate our environment, talk a new game, join a new club, far more easily than we can change the way we respond emotionally. It is easier to change behavior than feelings about that behavior.

The human race has to be bad at psychology; if it were not, it would understand why it is bad at everything else.

People are not the way they are primarily in order to annoy me.

People act on the outside the way they feel on the inside.

Life isn’t like the movies. People don’t change overnight. people don’t go from arrogant and self-righteous to ashamed and remorseful. They don’t suddenly give in when they’ve spent years taking out. No doesn’t magically become a Yes.

I can be incredibly angry with someone, I can be incredibly critical, but... I went through a period where I was reading a lot of memoirs of guards in holocausts and serial killers. I like to understand why people do bad things.

People don't change just because you know more about them.

As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.

If people tell you what you really don't want to hear what's unpleasant-there's an almost automatic reaction of antipathy. You have to train yourself out of it.

It's not too difficult to get the skeletons out of the closet with people, but to get the gold out is a different matter. That is therapy. Psychology is the Art of finding the gold of the spirit.

I didn't realise how important stupid people are in your life, because you ask yourself, what made stupid people so stupid? What made them the way they are?

People can get accustomed to anything, right? Habit does things to people.

People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.

If you are willing to change your thinking, you can change your feelings. If you change your feelings, you can change your actions. And changing your actions - based on good thinking - can change your life.

I'm curious about what makes people do things that they do, unless it's absolutely terrifying to me.

By nature, most people are controlled by their emotions. They feel sad, so they look sad.

People know that both my parents were shrinks so I was sort of raised in an atmosphere where there was that interest in the human mechanism and the human psyche and what makes people tick. And yes, I think I'm particularly creative and adventurous and improvisational and spontaneous in my inner impulses and patterns and deeply curious and appetized in the unfathomably mysterious and delicious phenomena that is the human being and who we really are.

People, like water, will run downhill, seeking their lowest level unless something interdicts them.

It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.

The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast, are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better.".