top of page
.png){kind=small}
"And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it-it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Philosophy quotes
"The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way: an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body."
"I'VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door. I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND."
"Let each person decide his or her fate."
"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."
"There is no such thing as reincarnation, but only similar incarnation."
"Mind and Soul are one and the same thing."
"Beauty, love with truth, that is all there is."
"Science without Philosophy leads to chaos. Philosophy without Science leads to nowhere. Only together they can construct a better world."
"...an age-old patter that seemed like chaos but was not..."
"It is always, first Self, then everything else."
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."
"Well,' I said, 'Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn't what you feel in New York - 'He was smiling. I stopped.'What do you feel in New York?' he asked.'Perhaps you feel,' I told him, 'all the time to come. There's such power there, everything is in such movement. You can't help wondering-I can't help wondering-what it will all be like-many years from now."
"That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with."
"One of the things, though, that has always afflicted the American reality and the American vision is this aversion to history. History is not something you read about in a book, history is not even the past-it's the present. Because everybody operates, whether or not we know it, out of assumptions which are produced and produced only by our history. Now the history of this country is not bloodier than other countries, but it's bloody. It is not more criminal than that of other countries, but it's criminal. Or in short, it's not worse than the history of France or England or any country we can name-but it's different."
"We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body."
"Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
"Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it."
"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."
bottom of page