bell hooks Love Quotations

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.

It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.

Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.

To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.

When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth.

Spirituality and spiritual life give us the strength to love.

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.

Women have endeavored to guide men to love because patriarchal thinking has sanctioned this work even as it has undermined it by teaching men to refuse guidance...A useful gift all love's practitioners can give is the offering of forgiveness. It not only allows us to move away from blame, from seeing others as the cause of our sustained lovelessness, but it enables us to experience agency, to know we can be responsible for giving and finding love.

Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. Self-love cannot flourish in isolation.

Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.

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.

Whenever domination is present, love is lacking.

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.

Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.

Love is first and foremost exemplified by action - by practice - not solely by feeling.

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.

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.

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.

Time and time again when I talk to individuals about approaching love with will and intentionality, I hear the fear expressed that this will bring an end to romance. This is simply not so. Approaching romantic love from foundation of care, knowledge, and respect actually intensifies romance

Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.

Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.

The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet al the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.

Love is an action, never simply a feeling.

But love is really more of an interactive process. It's about what we do not just what we feel. It's a verb, not a noun.

The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.

The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our ‘natural’ condition.

Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition.

You must have courage to love, you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, and it does not come easy.

Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being.

How different things might be if, 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 say "I am loving" or "I will love." Our patterns around romantic love are unlikely to change if we do not change our language.

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.

schools for love do not exist. everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love. those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. however this love often eludes us.

Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.

If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.

If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.

Without justice there can be no love.

The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.

I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this “In order to love you, I must make you something else”. That’s what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.

The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.

In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.

A major part of love is commitment. If we are committed to someone, if I'm committed to loving you, then it's not possible for me to 'fall out of love.'

Certainly we can end racism with love. We can demand that the federal government change its emphasis on racial distinction.

I love my family, even as I critique their dysfunctionalities.

The people I love, I'm committed to loving for the rest of my life.

I don't think you can hate anything that you know intimately. There is no fine line separating love from hate because there's a deep chasm separating love from hate.

The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem.