Quote

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.

Bell Hooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bell Hooks
Past
Receive
Give
Heal
Giving
Leads
Heart
However
Love
Impossible
Making
Closing
Often
Intensity
Given
Wounds

More quotes by Bell Hooks

Image
I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life. I just think if we could take all the obsession with the personal (inaudible), and personal judgment and have people be concerned about the environment, what a different world we would live in.
Bell Hooks
Image
What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.
Bell Hooks
Image
Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.
Bell Hooks
Image
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.
Bell Hooks
Image
. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.
Bell Hooks
Image
To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.
Bell Hooks
Image
I feel that I have many real students whom I have not met. Many are in cloisters and they never get out. Others are in prison. But in many cases they practice the teachings much better than those who meet me every day.
Bell Hooks
Image
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.
Bell Hooks
Image
It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.
Bell Hooks
Image
feminism is for everybody
Bell Hooks
Image
As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.
Bell Hooks
Image
there is no politically neutral art.
Bell Hooks
Image
As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.
Bell Hooks
Image
Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive
Bell Hooks
Image
We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.
Bell Hooks
Image
..Acts of appropriation are part of the process by which we make ourselves. Appropriating - taking something for one’s own use - need not be synonymous with exploitation. This is especially true of cultural appropriation. The “use” one makes of what is appropriated is the crucial factor.
Bell Hooks
Image
Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.
Bell Hooks
Image
If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.
Bell Hooks
Image
My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.
Bell Hooks
Image
Solidarity is not the same as support. To experience solidarity, we must have a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood. Support can be occasional. It can be given and just as easily withdrawn. Solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment.
Bell Hooks