25 result(s) for James Baldwin Quotes About Optimism.
"I can't be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive."
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
"The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even but a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world."
"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."
"One has to believe that one can do something. One has to keep the possibility in one's mind that one can do something."
"For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become."
"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
Can't find the quotes you're looking for?
"Please try to remember that what things cost in Europe has absolutely no bearing on what things cost in Harlem."
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
"The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions."
"You write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it."
"People can cry much easier than they can change."
"The questions which one asks oneself, and only oneself, at that hour of the night when one is alone and naked, are the most important questions one will ever ask."
"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."
"A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled."
"The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and what remains is the unimaginable night."
"If I am not what I ought to be, whose fault is that? Could it be that nobody showed me?"
"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
"We are all trapped in a history which we do not understand."
"It is astonishing the things that one can do when one must."
"We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only people who can change it."
Can't find the quotes you're looking for?
"You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back."
"The delicate face of a child is the clearest, most accurate picture of reality there is."
"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
"You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If you decide you are something, then you are that thing. The world will take its cue from you."
