J.F. Baldwin Quotes

Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

Occasionally the impossible happens; this is a truism that accounts for much of what we call good luck; and also, bad.

The shadow of fear and uncertainty lies over most of us; for us the future seems far from being as clear and open as we believed it would be.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

I've been sober now for a couple of years and I'm taking my sobriety very seriously - one day at a time and I am moving forward in my career.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

Like all science, psychology is knowledge; and like science again, it is knowledge of a definite thing, the mind.

Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.

Our own government has become our enemy.

The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.

In Socrates' thought the two marks of individual self-consciousness appear; it is practical and it is social.

Plato stands for the union of truth and goodness in the supreme idea of God.

Pythagoras took the next important step by subordinating the mere matter of nature to its essential principle of form and order, identifying the latter with reason or the soul.

The prehistorical and primitive period represents the true infancy of the mind.

Creatures of a very particular making, we need to know the cultural blinders that narrow our world view as well as the psychological blinders that narrow our view of our personal experience.

After an interval of two and a half centuries, the tradition of mystic illumination renewed itself in Italy and Germany.

Spiritual life is contractual. The sacred cannot dialogue with the unresponsive.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

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

I'm very focused on the world and my career and my Porsche turbo and making money and Stevie B. Inc. I'm just living according to the standards of the world.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat ya with until you realize who's in ruttin' command here!

I was involved with drama departments since the 5th grade. I played at it. It was an escape.

Everybody I've ever worked with - 99.9 percent of the time, I've had a successful or very agreeable experience with.

Stillness as a technique is still really captivating to me.

A statesman wants courage and a statesman wants vision; but believe me, after six months' experience, he wants first, second, third and all the time - patience.

I think my exact comment was that if Bush won it would be a good time to leave the United States. I'm not necessarily going to leave the United States.

Jesus isn't a logo, I'm not promoting some company, some brand. I'm just professing my faith.

Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

I tested for a couple of pilots, but they said I was too tall.

Denzel Washington's career is an enormous luxury. Compare him to Wesley Snipes.

You get a sense of how the show works and then let your personality take over.

The only defense is offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you wish to save yourselves.

The work of a Prime Minister is the loneliest job in the world.

I'm a Jewish born-again Christian.

I've run my mouth pretty good about my beliefs.

The attainment of an ideal is often the beginning of a disillusion.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

I'm your full blown charismatic evangelical freak daddy.

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

And all Halloween candy pales next to candy corn, if only because candy corn used to appear, like the Great Pumpkin, solely on Halloween.

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.

You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!

The purpose of life is not to maintain personal comfort; it's to grow the soul.