Quotes About Love Bell Hooks

#1. 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.

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#2. To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.

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#3. A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well.

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#4. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love.

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#5. 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.

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#6. An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as (we) were taught to believe that we were loved.

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#7. I learned then that it is more fulfilling to live one's life within a circle of love, interacting with loved ones to whole we are committed.

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#8. Part of why I have started writing about love is feeling that our culture is forgetting what Martin Luther King taught. We name more and more streets and schools after him but that's almost irrelevant, because what is to be remembered is that strength to love.

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#9. Enjoying the benefits of living and loving in community empowers us to meet strangers without fear and extend to them the gift of openness and recognition. Just by speaking to a stranger, acknowledging their presence on the planet, we make a connection.

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#10. We fail at romantic love when we have not learned the art of loving. It's as simple as that. Often we confuse perfect passion with perfect love.

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#11. 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.

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

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#13. We have power as consumers. We can exercise that power all the time by not choosing to invest time, energy or funds to support the production of mass media images that do not reflect life-enhancing values, that undermine a love ethic.

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#14. Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.

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#15. I love my family, even as I critique their dysfunctionalities.

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#16. The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem.

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#17. That huge majority of black folks who identify as Christian or as believers in other religious faiths (Islam, Buddhism, Yoruba, and so on) need to return to sacred writings about love and embrace these as guides showing us the way to lead our lives.

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#18. 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.

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#19. I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.

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#20. The mass media dwells on and perpetuates an ethic of domination and violence because our image makers have more intimate knowledge of these realities than they have with the realities of love.

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#21. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively.

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#22. Men theorize about love, but women are more often love's practitioners. Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.

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#23. Time and time again when I talk to individuals about approaching love with will and intentionality, I hear the fear expressed that this will bring an end to romance. This is simply not so. Approaching romantic love from foundation of care, knowledge, and respect actually intensifies romance.

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#24. Men writing about love always testify that they have received love ... ..Women, more often than not, speak from a position of lack, of not having received the love we long for.

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#25. Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.

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#26. Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. Self-love cannot flourish in isolation.

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#27. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

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#28. I believe that this nation can only heal from the wounds of racism if we all begin to love blackness. And by that I don't mean that we love only that which is best within us, but that we're also able to love that which is faltering, which is wounded, which is contradictory, incomplete.

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#29. If men were socialized to desire love as much as they are taught to desire sex, we would see a cultural revolution.

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#30. The choice to love is a choice to connect
to find ourselves in the other.

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#31. Like hedonistic consumption, we are encouraged to believe that the excesses of the family are normal and that it is abnormal to believe that one can have a functional, loving family.

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

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#33. I don't think you can hate anything that you know intimately. There is no fine line separating love from hate because there's a deep chasm separating love from hate.

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#34. There can be no love without justice.

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#35. 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.

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

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#37. A very hurting thing for Black Americans - to feel that we can't love our enemies. People forget what a great tradition we have as African-Americans in the practice of forgiveness and compassion. And if we neglect that tradition, we suffer.

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#38. Remember, care is a dimension of love, but simply giving care does not mean we are loving.

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#39. 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.

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#40. 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.

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#41. Indeed, all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic.

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#42. 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.

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#43. It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.

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#44. Whenever domination is present, love is lacking.

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#45. 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.

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#46. When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.

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#47. Those who choose to walk on love's path are well served if they have a guide. That guide can enable us to overcome fear if we trust that they will not lead us astray or abandon us along the way.

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#48. When I write provocative social and cultural criticism that causes readers to stretch their minds, to think beyond set paradigms, I think of that work as love in action. While it may challenge, disturb and at times even frighten or enrage readers, love is always the place where I begin and end.

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#49. While the will to love is present in very young children, they still need guidance in the ways of love.

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#50. 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.

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#51. If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.

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#52. 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.

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#53. We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything.

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#54. If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades it's meaning.

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#55. When men and women are loyal to ourselves and others, when we love justice, we understand fully the myriad ways in which lying diminishes and erodes the possibility of meaningful, caring connection, that it stands in the way of love.

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#56. 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.

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#57. 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.

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#58. Love allows us to confront these negative realities in a manner that is life-affirming and life enhancing.

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#59. My belief that God is love, that love is everything
our true destiny
sustains me.

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#60. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.

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#61. Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.

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#62. All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.

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#63. Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.

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#64. In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.

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#65. 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.

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#66. Couples who rarely or never have sex can know lifelong love.

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#67. Ironically, the worship of of death as a strategy for coping with our underlying fear of death's power does not truly give us solace. It is deeply anxiety producing. The more we watch spectacles of death, of random violence and cruelty, the more afraid we become in our daily lives.

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#68. 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.

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#69. The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false. In actuality, living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth.

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#70. Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.

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#71. Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. When we see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love.

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#72. Without justice there can be no love.

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#73. Ultimately the men who choose against violence, against death, do so because they want to live fully and well, because they want to know love. These are the men who are true heroes, the men whose lives we need to know about, honor, and remember.

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#74. A central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.

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#75. 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.

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#76. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it's a decision, it's a judgement, it's a promise.

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#77. Shame makes self-acceptance and self-love impossible.

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#78. The search for love continued even in the face of great odds.

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#79. Our cultural obsession with death consumes energy that could be given to the art of loving.

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#80. 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.

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#81. Women have greater freedom than ever before, and yet it is not clear whether that freedom has given us greater access to true love. It is not clear how that freedom has changed the nature of romance and partnerships.

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#82. 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.

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#83. Most folks believe we are hardwired biologically to long for sex but they do not believe we are hardwired to long for love. Almost everyone believes that we can have sex without love; mosr folks do not believe that a couple can have love in a relationship if there is no sex.

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#84. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat

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#85. Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love's path is communication.

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#86. 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.

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#87. Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.

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#88. I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.

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#89. Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.

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#90. When anyone thinks a woman who serves "gives 'cause that's what mothers or real women do," they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts.

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#91. In truth, true love is all about work.

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#92. Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse.

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#93. Boys need healthy self-esteem. They need love. And a wise and loving feminist politics can provide the only foundation to save the lives of male children. Patriarchy will not heal them. If that were so they would all be well.

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#94. The people I love, I'm committed to loving for the rest of my life.

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#95. Embracing love ethic means that we utilize all dimensions of love
"care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge"
in our everyday lives.

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

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#97. To maintain and satisfy greed, one must support domination. And the world of domination is always a world without love.

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#98. Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.

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#99. 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.

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#100. I think this is often misunderstood in the West, where people feel that there can be no justice unless everything is the same. This is part of why I feel we have to relearn how we think about love, because we think about love so much in terms of the self.

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