Quotes from bell hooks

Since true love sheds light on those aspects of ourselves we may wish to deny or hide, enabling us to see ourselves clearly and without shame, it is not surprising that so many individuals who say they want to know love turn away when such love beckons.

You can't talk about women's rights until we include all women. When you deny one woman of her rights, you deny all.

If women and men want to know love, we have to yearn for feminism. For without feminist thinking and practice we lack the foundation to create loving bonds.

Patriarchal masculinity requires of boys and men not only that they see themselves as more powerful and superior to women but that they do whatever it takes to maintain their controlling position. This is one of the reasons men, more so than women, use lying as a means of gaining power in relationships.

Starting with clear definitions of love, of feeling, intention and will, I no longer enter relationships with the lack of awareness that leads me to make all bonds the site for repeating old patterns.

Addiction makes love impossible.

He had always been emotionally unavailable and not at all interested in love either as a topic for discussion or a daily life practice, but he was absolutely confident that he had something meaningful to say on the subject.

We fail at romantic love when we have not learned the art of loving

Ethics and aesthetics are deeply intertwined. Art, beauty, and craft have always drawn on the self-organizing 'wild' side of language and mind. Human ideas of place and space, our contemporary focus on watersheds, become both models and metaphors. Our hope would be to see the interacting realms, learn where we are, and thereby move towards a style of planetary and ecological cosmopolitanism.

If one assumes, as I do, that battery is caused by the belief permeating this culture that hierarchical rule and coercive authority are natural, then all our relationships tend to be based on power and domination, and thus all forms of battery are linked.

A commitment to a spiritual life requires us to do more than read a good book or go on a restful retreat. It requires conscious practice, a willingness to unite the way we think with the way we act.

Forgiveness is an act of generosity. It requires that we place releasing someone else from the prison of their guilt or anguish over our feelings of outrage or anger.

The exciting aspect of creating a classroom community where there is respect for individual voices is that there is infinitely more feedback because students do feel free to talk — and talk back. And, yes, often this feedback is critical. Moving away from the need for immediate affirmation was crucial to my growth as a teacher. I learned to respect that shifting paradigms or sharing knowledge in new ways challenges; it takes time for students to experience that challenge as positive.

Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion.

Attention is an important resource.

In today's world we are taught to fear the truth, to believe it always hurts. We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potential losers.

male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape

This nameless angel gave Kubler-Ross the most valuable lesson of her life, telling her: Death is not a stranger to me. He is an old, old acquaintance. It takes courage to befriend death. We find that courage in life through loving.

To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin

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.

A culture that is dead to love can only be resurrected by spiritual awakening.

Feminism is for everybody.

Poems of lamentation allow the melancholic loss that never truly disappears to be given voice. Like a slow solemn musical refrain played again and again, they call us to remember and mourn, to know again that as we work for change our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.

There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society...Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture.