James Baldwin

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.