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"If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go."
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Exlpore more Inspirational quotes

"Night is the fatherland of the great inspirations."

"Like the evangelist, I will shine with the light I have been shown, recognise that I have the ultimate solution for all my prospects, nurture that feeling deep within, and repeat the words to myself every day, until there is no doubt in my mind that keeping such good news hidden would be the very worst type of sin."

"My intention was, only, ever to help you see the light shining brightly in front, and inside, of you."

"Nunca habría sido capaz de decírselo, pero Owen me inspiraba. Las mentiras piadosas que yo decía a diario, las cosas que me guardaba, cada vez que no era sincera del todo... ahora me daba cuenta de eso. También era consciente de lo bien que me sentaba al ser capaz de decirle a alguien lo que pensaba de veras. Aunque solo fuera sobre música."

"Why does she have wings?'So she can fly."

"Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death."

"Beauty will save the world."

"Self-education is lifelong curiosity."

"Hail to thee blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert That from Heaven or near it Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

"Such music", he said. "I'm not religious, but if I were I would say it was like a glimpse into the mind of God. Perhaps it was and i ought to be religious. I have to keep reminding myself that they didn't create the music, they only created the instrument which could read the score. And the score was life itself. And it's all up there"."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin

"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."

"Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx."

"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."

"I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain."

"I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it must always happen "here" before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves."

"But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place."

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."
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