Top 500 Bell Hooks Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.”

— Bell Hooks

202. “My belief that God is love, that love is everything – our true destiny – sustains me.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

204. “If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.”

— Bell Hooks

205. “Yearning is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice.”

— Bell Hooks

206. “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.”

— Bell Hooks

207. “Male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape.”

— Bell Hooks

208. “Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love.”

— Bell Hooks

209. “Often emphasis on identity and lifestyle is appealing because it creates a false sense that one is engaged in praxis. However, praxis within any political movement that aims to have a radical transformative impact on society cannot be solely focused on creating spaces wherein would-be radicals experience safety and support. Feminist movement to end sexist oppression actively engages participants in revolutionary struggle. Struggle is rarely safe or pleasurable.”

— Bell Hooks

210. “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.”

— Bell Hooks

211. “Love and abuse cannot co-exist.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

213. “When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images.”

— Bell Hooks

214. “All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.”

— Bell Hooks

215. “But simply being the victim of an exploitative or oppressive system and even resisting it does not mean we understand why it’s in place or how to change it.”

— Bell Hooks

216. “Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture.”

— Bell Hooks

217. “Unfortunately, our over-emphasis on the male as oppressor often obscures the fact that men too are victimized. To be an oppressor is dehumanizing and anti-human in nature, as it is to be a victim. Patriarchy forces fathers to act as monsters, encourages husbands and lovers to be rapists in disguise; it teaches our blood brothers to feel ashamed that they care for us, and denies all men the emotional life that would act as a humanizing, self-affirming force in their lives.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

219. “Living by a love ethic we learn to value loyalty and a commitment to sustained bonds over material advancement.”

— Bell Hooks

220. “I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice. The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.”

— Bell Hooks

221. “No wonder then that male rage is often most directed at women in intimate relationships. Such relationships clearly trigger for many males the anger and rage they felt in childhood when their mothers did not protect them or ruthlessly severed emotional bonds in the name of patriarchy.”

— Bell Hooks

222. “Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.”

— Bell Hooks

223. “It is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love’s absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.”

— Bell Hooks

224. “When we can see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build on the necessary foundation for self-love.”

— Bell Hooks

225. “I’m such a girl for the living room. I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that that’s a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn’t that interested in moving from place to place.”

— Bell Hooks

226. “Who we are as African-Americans, as black folks in the diaspora, our cultural destiny, has been shaped by both the enslaved and the free.”

— Bell Hooks

227. “Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your life. To choose growth is to embrace a love that heals.”

— Bell Hooks

228. “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.”

— Bell Hooks

229. “Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone.”

— Bell Hooks

230. “If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.”

— Bell Hooks

231. “If Black women stand strong and our commitment is to ending domination I know that I’m supporting Black males, Black children male and female Black elderly because the bottom line is the struggle to end domination in all its forms.”

— Bell Hooks

232. “Being loving does not mean we will not be betrayed. Love helps up face betrayal without losing heart. And it renews our spirit so we can love again.”

— Bell Hooks

233. “When men did most of the work women worked to make home a site of comfort and relaxation for males. Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were not present. When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort, and pleasure.”

— Bell Hooks

234. “Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable.”

— Bell Hooks

235. “The message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge.”

— Bell Hooks

236. “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.”

— Bell Hooks

237. “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.”

— Bell Hooks

238. “I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy.”

— Bell Hooks

239. “My students tell me, we don’t want to love! We’re tired of being loving! And I say to them, if you’re tired of being loving, then you haven’t really been loving, because when you are loving you have more strength.”

— Bell Hooks

240. “When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.”

— Bell Hooks

241. “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.”

— Bell Hooks

242. “We make the revolutionary history, telling the past as we have learned it mouth-to-mouth, telling the present as we see, know, and feel it in our heats and with our words.”

— Bell Hooks

243. “How different things might be if, rather than saying “I think I’m in love,” we were saying “I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love... ” Or if instead of saying “I am in love” we said “I am loving” or “I will love.”

— Bell Hooks

244. “In popular culture love is always the stuff of fantasy. Maybe this is why men have done most of the theorizing about love. Fantasy has primarily been their domain, both in the sphere of cultural production and in everyday life. Male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape.”

— Bell Hooks

245. “Couples who rarely or never have sex can know lifelong love.”

— Bell Hooks

246. “Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they chose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them.”

— Bell Hooks

247. “Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love.”

— Bell Hooks

248. “Women talk about love. From girlhood on, we learn that conversations about love are a gendered narrative, a female subject... Femaleness in patriarchal culture marks us from the very beginning as unworthy or not as worthy, and it should come as no surprise that we learn to worry most as girls, as women, about whether we are worthy of love.”

— Bell Hooks

249. “Self-acceptance is hard for many of us. There is a voice inside that is constantly judging, first ourselves and then others.”

— Bell Hooks

250. “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.”

— Bell Hooks