Here’s a selection of Bell Hooks Quotes, covering topics such as women, for everybody, community, inpiration and life.
We really hope you enjoy these quotes and that they give you something to think about.
I don’t trust anybody who isn’t a little bit neurotic.
Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
I take it as a compliment when somebody calls me crazy. I would be offended if I was one of the sheeple, one of the sleepwalkers in the matrix or part of the collective hallucination we call ‘normal.
To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.
When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.
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.
For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?.
But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.
as females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing– yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves
We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.
Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.
If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.
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.
But love is really more of an interactive process. It’s about what we do not just what we feel. It’s a verb, not a noun.
In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.
Live simply so that others may simply live.
[O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.
When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.
Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.
All over the world, young males and females, schooled in the art of patriarchal thinking, are building an identity on a foundation that sees the will to do violence as the essential way to assert being.
If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.
I think our culture doesn’t recognize passion, because real passion has the power to disrupt boundaries.
The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.
Addressing the economic plight of women may ultimately be the feminist platform that draws a collective response. It may well become the place of collective organizing, the common ground, the issue that unites all women.
The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.
Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.
When we are loving, we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.
Our society shuns people for being a bright light in the world. Sometimes if you are too futuristic people do not like how revolutionary you are.
The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.
A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers – the experience of knowing we always belong.
Love is an action, never simply a feeling.
True resistance begins with people confronting pain… and wanting to do something to change it.
Most feminist groups began with women talking about how we saw ourselves and other women, how we acted. We openly confessed our fears and hatred of other women. We talked about how to combat jealousy, the politics of envy, and so on.
When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.
Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
Whether we’re talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where the learning is.
As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.
The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.
Wisely, baldwin insisted that we are always more than our pain. Not only did he believe in our capacity to love, he felt black people were uniquely situated to risk loving because we had suffered.
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.
I have always been a flirt. My mother says whe I was a child, I used to stand outside the house and just smile at everyone who walked by. Like, ‘Please take me with you!’
The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.
Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.
Your fear of becoming a cliche is what turns you into one. If you remove the fear, we are all really walking contradictions, hypocrites and paradoxical cliches.
Living simply makes loving simple.
When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.
Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.
We don’t really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don’t encourage boys to be whole.
What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe.
Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.
I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.
I love my family, even as I critique their dysfunctionalities.
The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.
What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.
What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.
You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.
If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.
I think life experiences are different for people who know what they want as children.
Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.
Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power – not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.
I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that’s a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn’t that interested in moving from place to place.
Vulnerability is the least celebrated emotion in our society.
The ethic of liberal individualism has so deeply permeated the psyches of blacks… of all classes that we have little support for a political ethic of communalism that promotes the sharing of resources.
I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out.
While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.
I have been at war with parts of myself for so long.
When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights – that we respect and uphold their rights.
Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.
I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions – a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.
Heightened awareness often gives the illusion that a problem is lessening. This is most often not the case. It may mean simply that a problem has become so widespread it can no longer remain hidden or be ignored.
I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.
Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that’s feminism.
Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.
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.
I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.
Being oppressed means the absence of choices.
To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.
We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they’re beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.
Give someone everything you can think of, the wings to fly and the roots to stay. If they chose none of these hold the door open for them with a smile.
Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.
Women will only be truly sexually liberated when we arrive at a place where we can see ourselves as having sexual value and agency irrespective of whether of not we are the objects of male desire.
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