1. “Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren.” – Bell Hooks
2. “Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.” – Bell Hooks
3. “Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.” – Bell Hooks
4. “Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” – Bell Hooks
5. “To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets.” – Bell Hooks
6. “The heart of justice is truth telling.” – Bell Hooks
7. “The need for instant gratification is a component of greed.” – Bell Hooks
8. “True resistance begins with people confronting pain… and wanting to do something to change it.” – Bell Hooks
9. “When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth.” – Bell Hooks
10. “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
11. “To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. ” – Bell Hooks
12. “Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love.” – Bell Hooks
13. “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” – Bell Hooks
14. “All of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions — and society — so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom.” – Bell Hooks
15. “There is light in darkness, you just have to find it.” – Bell Hooks
16. “Being oppressed means the absence of choices.” – Bell Hooks
17. “True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.” – Bell Hooks
18. “But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone.” – Bell Hooks
19. “There can be no love without justice.” – Bell Hooks
20. “No woman has ever written enough.” – Bell Hooks
21. “To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.” – Bell Hooks
22. “Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.” – Bell Hooks
23. “Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.” – Bell Hooks
24. “The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.” – Bell Hooks
25. “Love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.” – Bell Hooks
26. “To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” – Bell Hooks
27. “feminism is for everybody” – Bell Hooks
28. “When we love we can let our hearts speak.” – Bell Hooks
29. “Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.” – Bell Hooks
30. “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients – care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.” – Bell Hooks
31. “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” – Bell Hooks
32. “A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming.” – Bell Hooks
33. “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.” – Bell Hooks
34. “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
35. “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?” – Bell Hooks
36. “The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.” – Bell Hooks
37. “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.” – Bell Hooks
38. “Whenever domination is present, love is lacking.” – Bell Hooks
39. “To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.” – Bell Hooks
40. “White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or… and oppression of others.” – Bell Hooks
41. “Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves ‘oppressed,’ no one would have taken them seriously.” – Bell Hooks
42. “Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.” – Bell Hooks
43. “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” – Bell Hooks
44. “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.” – Bell Hooks
45. “What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.” – Bell Hooks
46. “Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience.” – Bell Hooks
47. “The search for love continued even in the face of great odds.” – Bell Hooks
48. “Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.” – Bell Hooks
49. “Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure.” – Bell Hooks
50. “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.” – Bell Hooks
51. “To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.” – Bell Hooks
52. “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
53. “All awakening to love is spiritual awakening.” – Bell Hooks
54. “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.” – Bell Hooks
55. “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.” – Bell Hooks
56. “If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.” – Bell Hooks
57. “In a culture of domination everyone is socialized to see violence as an acceptable means of social control.” – Bell Hooks
58. “Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” – Bell Hooks
59. “Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.” – Bell Hooks
60. “All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.” – Bell Hooks
61. “A good teacher is someone who can help you to get back to a teacher within.” – Bell Hooks
62. “To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. The school was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.” – Bell Hooks
63. “Without justice there can be no love.” – Bell Hooks
64. “Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.” – Bell Hooks
65. “Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.” – Bell Hooks
66. “Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth.” – Bell Hooks
67. “Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice.” – Bell Hooks
68. “All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.” – Bell Hooks
69. “Men do not wound women only when they act violently and abusively. They wound us when they fail to protect our freedom in every aspect of our daily lives.” – Bell Hooks
70. “Spirituality and spiritual life give us the strength to love.” – Bell Hooks
71. “Living simply makes loving simple.” – Bell Hooks
72. “Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being.” – Bell Hooks
73. “Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.” – Bell Hooks
74. “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.” – Bell Hooks
75. “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.” – Bell Hooks
76. “When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.” – Bell Hooks
77. “Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.” – Bell Hooks
78. “Patriarchy has no gender.” – Bell Hooks
79. “I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.” – Bell Hooks
80. “The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created.” – Bell Hooks
81. “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
82. “The word “love” is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.” – Bell Hooks
83. “The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom…” – Bell Hooks
84. “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.” – Bell Hooks
85. “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.” – Bell Hooks
86. “Sadly, children’s passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.” – Bell Hooks
87. “We do not have to love. We choose to love.” – Bell Hooks
88. “Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.” – Bell Hooks
89. “Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.” – Bell Hooks
90. “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
91. “Language is also a place of struggle.” – Bell Hooks
92. “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.” – Bell Hooks
93. “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.” – Bell Hooks
94. “Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.” – Bell Hooks
95. “The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem.” – Bell Hooks
96. “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.” – Bell Hooks
97. “To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.” – Bell Hooks