Quotes from bell hooks

Giving is the way we also learn how to receive. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love. 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.

Without knowing one another, we can never experience intimacy.

Often, when information is withheld by women and men, protection of privacy is the justification. In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy. Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings—where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information.

An overall cultural embrace of a love ethic would mean that we would all oppose much of the public policy conservatives condone and support.

Faith enables us to move past fear. We can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable both in word and deed.

Forgiveness opens us up and prepares us to receive love.

Death is always there to remind us that our plans are transitory. By learning to love, we learn to accept change. Without change, we cannot grow. Our will to grow in spirit and truth is how we stand before life and death, ready to choose life.

In a racially imperialist nation such as ours, it is the dominant race that reserves for itself the luxury of dismissing racial identity while the oppressed race is made daily aware of their racial identity. It is the dominant race that can make it seem that their experience is representative.

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 said "I am loving" or "I will love." Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.

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 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

We need a map to guide us on our journey to love—starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love.

Youth culture today is cynical about love. And that cynicism has come from their pervasive feeling that love cannot be found.

In the more than fourteen years we were together we were too busy repeating old patterns learned in childhood, acting on misguided information about the nature of love, to appreciate the changes we needed to make in ourselves to be able to love someone else.

As John Welwood reminds us in Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love, "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.

We often overestimate the degree to which exploitative behavior has been normalized and the degree to which we've internalized these norms. It takes, then, a commitment to an acutely self-conscious practice to be able to think and behave better than we've been taught.

It is impossible to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth when the core of one's being and identity is shrouded in secrecy and lies.

You could be Jesus in drag, but if you're brown, they're sure you're selling.

Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known.

It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself.

Shaming is one way to intimidate and break the spirit.

Consumer culture in particular encourages lies. Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy.

Feminist efforts to grant women social equality with men of their class neatly coincided with white supremacist capitalist patriarchal fears that white power would diminish if nonwhite people gained equal access to economic power and privilege. Supporting what in effect became white power reformist feminism enabled the mainstream white supremacist patriarchy to bolster its power while simultaneously undermining the radical politics of feminism.

Quando conhecemos o amor, quando amamos, é possível enxergar o passado com outros olhos; é possível transformar o presente e sonhar o futuro. Esse é o poder do amor. O amor cura. - art. Vivendo de Amor p.(12)

Indeed, all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic. Yet young listeners remain reluctant to embrace the idea of love as a transformative force.