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"It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself."
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Exlpore more Self-Improvement quotes
"Seek to develop your skill and talent to a level of relevance. Create a platform to shine and make sure you are bringing a difference to the areas that require your expertise. A pastor who does not teach or pray for people, a football player always playing pool, a body builder who doesn't eat but sleeps all day, a student who studies only towards examinations, a politician without a cause and a business without a customer service culture all have one thing in common " sooner or later they will all become irrelevant. Never miss the chance to practice the call of your mission, even if you are not getting paid for it."
"It is better to find your own faults and rectify them than to find thousands of faults in others."
"Be yourself, free being."
"Before we can change the world, we have to change ourselves. We can do it by focusing, concentrating, meditating, and self-realizing."
"Let us not dwell into past thoughts, worn out ideas, false beliefs. Let them go so that you can create a new self by emptying your mind and filling it with new thoughts, ideas, and visions."
"Be the best of yourself."
"You better go alone, than with negative people!"
"Improve your relationship with you."
"Uproot the spirit of reluctancy out of your life and invest the spirit of stickability in this year of 2014."
"There is no difference between the person who wishes he can change his bad character and did not and the person who never wished for it. Wishes alone don't change the world!"
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin
"You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky."
"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption-which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards-is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals."
"There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."
"What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be--not seem--outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined--as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one's own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more."
"The necessity, then, of those "lesser breeds without the law-those wogs, barbarians, niggers-is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply "spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again, leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest."
"Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist."
"But the conquest of the physical world is not man's only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place."
"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 simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."
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