773 Quotes by Bell Hooks

What the world needs now is liberated men who have the qualities Silverstein cites, men who are ‘empathetic and strong, autonomous and connected, responsible to self, to family and friends, to society, and capable of understanding how those responsibilities are, ultimately, inseparable.’ Men need feminist thinking. It it the theory that supports their spiritual evolution and their shift away from the patriarchal model. Patriarchy is destroying the well-being of men, taking their lives daily.

Shame makes self-acceptance and self-love impossible.

Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.

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.

The choice to love is a choice to connect – to find ourselves in the other.

The feeling that I’ve done something wrong, that I really don’t know what it is, that there’s something terribly wrong with my very being, leads to a sense of utter hopelessness. This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am; there is no way I can matter or be worthy of anyone’s love as long as I remain myself. I must find a way to be someone else – someone who is lovable. Someone who is not me.

To practice the art of loving we have first to choose love – admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what that means. The deeply cynical, who have lost all belief in love’s power, have to step blindly out on faith.

Our cultural obsession with death consumes energy that could be given to the art of loving.

We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they’re beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.