James Baldwin Quotes

People don't know anything about themselves because they're all worried about everybody else.

She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.

I think that some people like to be someone other than themselves when acting, while others are most themselves. I fall into the second camp. For me, acting is a great exercise in getting to the truth about myself.

What you are is a question only you can answer.

Like blind hens, we are ignorant of our own self and the depths within us.

If you cannot find the truth within yourself, where else do you expect to find it?

We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in that spirit that we can hear or read a teaching and then look at our own lives, at our own experiences to see whether anything might have been revealed about them.

Walk slowly; all you can ever come to is yourself.

At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is.

It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

The fundamental law of nature is to not know too much about yourself.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

For all my education, accomplishments, and so called 'wisdom'... I can't fathom my own heart.

When you act, you're always playing a version of yourself. You can't bring more to the role than what you are.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

I must find a truth that is true for me.

We should not be upset that others hide the truth from us, when we hide it so often from ourselves

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

There are lots of things we choose not to see. Doesn't mean they aren't there, even if we wish they weren't.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

Knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.

You don't throw your life away Going Inside You get to know who's watching you And besides you resides in your body

You have not known what you are - you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return? The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk.

We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.