Quotes from bell hooks

Lifestyle feminism ushered in a notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism. And the assumption prevailed that no matter what a woman's politics, be she conservative or liberal, she too could fit feminism into her existing lifestyle.

Because children can innately offer affection or respond to affectionate care by returning it, it is often assumed that they know how to love and therefore do not need to learn the art of loving. While the will to love is present in very young children, they still need guidance in the ways of love. Grown-ups provide that guidance.

Addicts want release from pain; they are not thinking about love. In Stanton Peele's useful book Love and Addiction, he makes the insightful point that addiction is not about relatedness. Addiction makes love impossible. [...] Hence, addiction is both a consequence of widespread lovelessness and a cause. [...] Greed characterizes the nature of this pursuit because it is unending; the desire is ongoing and can never be fully satisfied.

Love is as love does, and it is our responsibility to give children love. 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.

It is no accident that greater cultural acceptance of lying in this society coincided with women gaining greater social equality.

revolutionary feminist thinking was most accepted and embraced in academic circles. In those circles the production of revolutionary feminist theory progressed, but more often than not that theory was not made available to the public. It became and remains a privileged discourse available to those among us who are highly literate, well-educated, and usually materially privileged.

All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning -- clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.

Shahrazad Ali's The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman.

Simply learning how we have acquired feelings of worthlessness rarely enables us to change things; it is usually one stage of the process.

Individuals who choose to love can and do alter our lives in ways that honor the primacy of a love ethic. We do this by choosing to work with individuals we admire and respect; by committing to give our all to relationships; by embracing a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet.

The fear of being self-assertive usually surfaces in women who have been trained to be good girls or dutiful daughters.

My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love's promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power or the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.

Whenever we heal family wounds, we strengthen community.

TESTIMONY IN NEW AGE writing affirms the way in which embracing a love ethic transforms life for the good. Yet a lot of this information only reaches those of us who have class privilege.

When greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization becomes acceptable. Then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behavior. It's the culture of exchange, the tyranny of marketplace values.

Everything we do in life is rooted in theory. Whether we consciously explore the reasons we have a particular perspective or take a particular action there is also an underlying system shaping our thought and practice.

Some heterosexual women decided that they would choose celibacy or lesbianism over seeking after unequal relationships with sexist men.

Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as 'the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.' Explaining further, he continues, 'Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both as an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.' Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.

An individual does not need to be a believer in a religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self - a life force (some of us call it soul) that when nurtured enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us

Pressed in therapy to describe my household of origin in terms of whether it was loving or not, I painfully admitted that I did not feel loved in our household but that I did feel cared for.

Bringing love into the work environment can create the necessary transformation that can make any job we do, no matter how menial, a place where workers can express the best of themselves. When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth. It's not what you do but how you do it.

Estar al margen es ser parte del todo, pero fuera del cuerpo principal.

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 a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.

Faith enables us to move past fear.