Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bell Hooks
Special
Abound
Purpose
Nurturing
Spiritual
Extend
Universe
Definitions
Another
Favorite
Self
Mines
Love
Mine
Growth

More quotes by Bell Hooks

Image
I think this is often misunderstood in the West, where people feel that there can be no justice unless everything is the same. This is part of why I feel we have to relearn how we think about love, because we think about love so much in terms of the self.
Bell Hooks
Image
All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.
Bell Hooks
Image
A central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.
Bell Hooks
Image
If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.
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
Image
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.
Bell Hooks
Image
I am passionate about everything in my life--first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society. --bell hooks
Bell Hooks
Image
While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.
Bell Hooks
Image
All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like..I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice.
Bell Hooks
Image
When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention, a disruption of white control over black images.
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
It is poetry that changes everything.
Bell Hooks
Image
Even when people capitalize my name, I don't freak out, even though that would not be my choice.
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
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
The intellectual tradition of the West is very individualistic. It's not community-based. The intellectual is often thought of as a person who is alone and cut off from the world. So I have had to practice being willing to leave the space of my study to be in community, to work in community, and to be changed by community.
Bell Hooks
Image
Readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.
Bell Hooks
Image
. . . no Black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind.
Bell Hooks
Image
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.
Bell Hooks
Image
We don't hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they're not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo.
Bell Hooks