Quote

We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.

Bell Hooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bell Hooks
Suffering
Flats
Often
Plain
Live
Consistent
Without
Wanting
World
Difficulty
Cause
Struggle
Flat
Causes
Valleys

More quotes by Bell Hooks

Image
Reviewing the literature on love I noticed how few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the ways of love.
Bell Hooks
Image
To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.
Bell Hooks
Image
feminism is for everybody
Bell Hooks
Image
Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.
Bell Hooks
Image
I think this is what people misunderstand about Martin Luther King saying to love your enemies. They think he was just using this silly little phrase, but what he meant was that as Black Americans we need to let our anger go, because holding on to it we hold ourselves down. We oppress ourselves by holding on to anger.
Bell Hooks
Image
Being oppressed means the absence of choices
Bell Hooks
Image
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.
Bell Hooks
Image
Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.
Bell Hooks
Image
Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change.
Bell Hooks
Image
My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives.
Bell Hooks
Image
Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves oppressed, no one would have taken them seriously.
Bell Hooks
Image
Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power - not because they don't see it, but because they see it and they don't want it to exist.
Bell Hooks
Image
Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
Bell Hooks
Image
Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.
Bell Hooks
Image
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.
Bell Hooks
Image
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.
Bell Hooks
Image
Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.
Bell Hooks
Image
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
Image
Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.
Bell Hooks
Image
We all may have prejudices, but we're not all part of a system that reinforces, reinvents and reaffirms itself every day of our lives, systemically.
Bell Hooks