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Bell Hooks Quotes - Page 4

All Quotes Abuse Acceptance Anarchy Art Awareness Belief Challenges Childhood Children Choices Commitment Community Compassion Country Criticism Culture Desire Diversity Effort Fate Feelings Feminism Focus Gender Giving Growth Heart Home Hurt Identity Imagination Integrity Justice Language Life Lifetime Loss Love Lying Oppression Pain Passion Patriarchy Prejudice Privacy Racism Rage Reading Reality Romantic Love School Self Esteem Self Love Sexism Shame Silence Sleep Soul Stress Struggle Students Suffering Teaching Understanding Vision War Writing

Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always

Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.

Love, Opportunity, Practice

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

Communication, Commitment, Care

bell hooks (2018). “All About Love: New Visions”, p.5, HarperCollins

Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

Fall, Passion, Writing

bell hooks (2013). “remembered rapture: the writer at work”, p.35, Macmillan

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

Focus, Important, Given

Source: nefac.net

When we are more energized by the practice of blaming than we are by efforts to create transformation, we not only cannot find relief from suffering, we are creating the conditions that help keep us stuck in the status quo

Practice, Creating, Effort

Bell Hooks (2013). “Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice”, p.29, Routledge

Justice demands integrity. It’s to have a moral universe — not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting.

Integrity, Justice, Perspective

When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better.

Lying, Men, Telling The Truth

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.

Cult Of Personality, Ideas, Consumers

bell hooks (2014). “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, p.227, Routledge

Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.

What Matters, Empowering, Desire

bell hooks, Amalia Mesa-Bains (2017). “Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism”, p.74, Routledge

Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.

Laughter, White, Laughing

bell hooks (2004). “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

Whenever domination is present, love is lacking.

Love Is, Domination, Lacking

bell hooks (2014). “Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics”, p.81, Routledge

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.

Happiness, Success, Perseverance

"Bell hooks talks to John Perry Barlow". www.lionsroar.com. September 1, 1995.

There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.

Feelings, Let It Go, Together

War in its essence is another form of capitalism. Wars make people rich - and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people's lives away from them. So much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group.

War, Essence, People

"How Do You Practice Intersectionalism? An Interview with bell hooks". Interview with Randy Lowens, nefac.net. March 15, 2012.

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

Men, White, America

bell hooks (2014). “Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism”, p.7, Routledge

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

Meaningful, Knowing, Love Relationship

A chat with Bell Hooks, www.cnn.com. February 17, 2000.

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

Inspirational, Book, Reading

bell hooks (2012). “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”, p.106, Routledge

It is necessary to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist – the potential victim within that we must rescue – otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation.

Thinking, Way, Firsts

bell hooks (2014). “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, p.33, Routledge

The capacity to love is tied to being able to be awake, to being able to move out of yourself and be with someone else in a manner that is not about your desire to possess them, but to be with them, to be in union and communion.

Moving, Reading, Love Is

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.

Ethos, Vision, Males

bell hooks (2014). “Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics”, p.14, Routledge

Women are often belittled for trying to resurrect these men and bring them back to life and to love. They are in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to love again. This labor of love is futile only when the men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point it is a gesture of self-love for women to break their commitment and move on.

Moving, Teaching, Commitment

I am passionate about everything in my life--first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society. --bell hooks

Thinking, Ideas, Intellectual

Bell Hooks (1996). “Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies”, p.110, Psychology Press

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

Love, Self, Growth

Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. It does not privilege women over men. It has the power to transform meaningfully all our lives

Struggle, Men, Race

bell hooks (2014). “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.45, Routledge

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

Hurt, Pain, Loss

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