James Baldwin Quotes

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.

You are inexperienced. So was I, once. So is every man. The measure of a person is not how much they have lived. . . It's in how they make us of what life has shown them.

We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage and indeed perhaps more.

I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow

The teacher you need is the person you're living with.

Every experience makes you grow.

Life experience is not something to be denied, but to be celebrated.

I have learned that I am not built for conflict or controversy. I have also learned that, in all my life, I have never chosen a story. The story has always chosen me.

I'm trying to make myself better. But I don't regret anything that I've gone through, because it makes me who I am.

All my life, since the time I was little, has been a long distraction. At least that is the way some people want to perceive it, but for me, it's given me a lot of strength.

Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it.

Sometimes you surprise yourself with what you can handle, and if you come out the other end with some wisdom, then it's not such a bad thing.

I never said I wanted a 'happy' life but an interesting one. From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward.

By the time you're 30, you know who you are inside. You learn to laugh at things you can't change; you learn to be yourself.

Generally, I like making my own mistakes and learning from them because that's what I think life is about.

I'm a romantic, but I'm not a romantic in the traditional sense. I like to romanticize what happens to me. Whatever happens to me - you could quantify it as good or bad - I romanticize it. I think along the lines of 'When that thing happened, it made me who I am.' That kind of thing. It's a different way of being romantic.

I've experienced great things, I've experienced great tragedies. I've done almost everything I could possibly ever imagine doing, but I just know that there's more.

I feel the older I get, the more I'm learning to handle life. Being on this quest for a long time, it's all about finding yourself.

If it were not for the bad things that've happened to me, I wouldn't be the person I am today.

Seven and half years ago I began my own journey. For me and my family it was a time of adversity. But during that adversity I derived a deeper faith. And born out of that adversity was a commitment to devote myself to those people and to those issues that truly matter to me.

Everything I have experienced in my life helps form who I am today, and I would not change or forget any of it.

Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.

Life isn't about algebra and geometry. Learning by making mistakes and not duplicating them is what life is about.

It has been an interesting road, but I wouldn't trade any of it for the world, because I feel like all of those instances in my life I felt molded me and strengthened me and made me who I am.