Best Bell Hooks Quotes
Bell Hooks Quotes About Feminism, Community, Education, Love, Writing & Success! American novelist and social activist Gloria Jean Watkins, popularly known by her pseudonym bell hooks, held the Distinguished Professor position. On September 25, 1952, Watkins was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She went to Hopkinsville High School and then got her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973. Her MA was completed in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. When Watkins was 19 years old, she began working on her book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which she finished in 1981.
In 1976, she began her academic career as an English professor and senior lecturer in ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. Also, she has taught at several universities, including Stanford University, Yale University, and The City University of New York, before joining Berea University in Berea and establishing the bell hooks Institute in 2014. Bell Blair Hooks, her maternal great-grandmother, was the inspiration for her pen-name, which she chose.
Writings on racism, feminism, and class have made her one of the best-known. The main point of hooks’ report was to look at how race, capitalism, and gender interact and how they can create and keep up oppression and class dominance systems. She wrote about 40 books, including everything from essays and poetry to books for kids. She wrote many scholarly articles, emerged in documentaries, and gave talks to the public. Her work talked about romance, race, category, sex, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. On December 15, 2021, she passed away.
Best Bell Hooks Quotes
1. “Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.” — Bell Hooks
2. “Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment…’dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love — which is to transform us.’ Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.” — Bell Hooks
3. “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.” — Bell Hooks
4. “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
5. “Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition.” — Bell Hooks
6. “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
7. “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.” — Bell Hooks
8. “Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.” — Bell Hooks
9. “The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite, waiting for the heart to awaken and call us back to the first memory of being the life force inside a dark place waiting to be born – waiting to see the light.” — Bell Hooks
10. “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
11. “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 say “I am loving” or “I will love.” Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.” — Bell Hooks
12. “The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.” — Bell Hooks
13. “Feminism is for everybody.” — Bell Hooks
14. “Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” — Bell Hooks
15. “Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.” — Bell Hooks
16. “Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed their strength or exploited it.” — Bell Hooks
17. “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.” — Bell Hooks
18. “My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers, we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.” — Bell Hooks
19. “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.” — Bell Hooks
20. “One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.” — Bell Hooks
21. “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
22. “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
23. “The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies. Living consciously is living with a core of healthy self-esteem. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.” — Bell Hooks
24. “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
25. “If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.” — Bell Hooks
