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Of all the definitions of love that abound in our universe, a special favorite of mine is... “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”

Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks
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More quotes by Bell Hooks

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The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last.
Bell Hooks
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Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse.
Bell Hooks
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as females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love most of us were and are slaves of longing-- yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves
Bell Hooks
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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
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There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.
Bell Hooks
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What's really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don't even really understand that equality hasn't happened with the pay force.
Bell Hooks
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While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not usually know the emotional costs of keeping a secret until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust.
Bell Hooks
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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
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If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.
Bell Hooks
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All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.
Bell Hooks
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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
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Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves oppressed, no one would have taken them seriously.
Bell Hooks
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When I write provocative social and cultural criticism that causes readers to stretch their minds, to think beyond set paradigms, I think of that work as love in action. While it may challenge, disturb and at times even frighten or enrage readers, love is always the place where I begin and end.
Bell Hooks
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Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.
Bell Hooks
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One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.
Bell Hooks
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There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.
Bell Hooks
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My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives.
Bell Hooks
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When we are more energized by the practice of blaming than we are by efforts to create transformation, we not only cannot find relief from suffering, we are creating the conditions that help keep us stuck in the status quo
Bell Hooks
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Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.
Bell Hooks
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To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.
Bell Hooks