Bell Hooks Quotes

You must have courage to love, you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, and it does not come easy.

There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.

The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.

Intersectionality allow us to focus on what is most important at a given point in time.

Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love.

When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.

The world would be a paradise of peace and justice if global citizens shared a common definition of love which would guide our thoughts and action.

Our freedom is sweet. It will be sweeter when we are all free.

It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

Secrets find a way out in sleep . . . It is the place where there is no pretense.

Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.

I would also say that, in practice, many more Americans are anarchists than would ever use that term.

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.

As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer.

We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

There is light in darkness, you just have to find it.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.

Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.

feminism is for everybody

I believe that it is impossible for two individuals not committed to their own and each other’s well being to sustain a healthy and enduring relationship.

I feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us.

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.

The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.

I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.

Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?

When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth.

Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition.

. . . no Black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind.

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.

Within a capitalist consumer society, the cult of personality has the power to subsume ideas, to make the person, the personality into the product and not the work itself.

Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.

Living simply makes loving simple.

There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.

Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.

One of the things I find most exciting is talking with people who are working with my work. Who are using it in some way with their life to address everyday politics of meaning.

I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.

To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.

Of all the definitions of love that abound in our universe, a special favorite of mine is... “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”

The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet al the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.

One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.

Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.

Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.

Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.