40 Bell Hooks phrases that teach about feminism and struggle

Honoring ourselves, loving our bodies, is an advanced stage in building healthy self-esteem.

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

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

We all yearn for love – we all seek it – even when we have no hope that it can actually be found.

What is a woman? I assure you, I don’t know. I don’t believe you know. I don’t believe anyone can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human ability.

I will not have my life shortened. I will not bow to someone else’s whim or ignorance.

Self-love is the basis of our loving practice. Without it, our other loving efforts fail.

Patriarchy has no gender.

The way we experience our grief is informed by whether we know love or not.

As long as women use class and racial power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot fully exist.

Before women could change the patriarchy, it was necessary to change ourselves by creating awareness.

Knowing how to be lonely is fundamental to the art of loving. When we are able to be alone, we can be with others without using them as forms of escape.

A man stripped of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a valued companion in the struggle.

Being oppressed means the absence of choices.

Instead of rethinking love and insisting on its importance and value, feminist discourse on love has simply ceased. And many women turned away from feminist politics because they felt they denied the importance of love.

Feminist thought and practice emphasize the value of mutual growth and self-fulfillment in intimate relationships.

Love is an action, never simply a feeling.

When we let go of fear, we can get closer to people, we can get closer to the earth, we can get closer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression.

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

The classroom is not a place for the stars, it is a place for learning.

It is necessary to distinguish and give credit to the specifics of each student and their role in the assembly line approach to learning.

Universities must begin to recognize that a student’s education is not just about time spent in the classroom.

White women and black men have both sides. They can act as an oppressor or and oppression of others.

Before demanding that others listen to me, I needed to listen to myself, to discover my identity.

The academy is not paradise, but learning is a place where paradise can be created.

Contemplating death always brings me back to love.

Writing and performing must deepen the meaning of words, it must illuminate, transfix and transform.

Our collective difficulties with art and the act of loving started from the slavery context.

When we black women experience the transforming force of love in our lives, we assume attitudes capable of completely altering existing social structures.

When we know love, when we love, it is possible to see the past with different eyes.

That’s the power of love. Love heals.

Entering a college classroom with a willingness to share the desire to stimulate enthusiasm was an act of transgression.

No black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind.

The only person who will never leave us, who we will never lose, is ourselves. Learning to love our feminine selves is where our search for love must begin.

Building community requires a vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that drives us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

When we’re taught that safety is in similarity, any kind of difference feels like a threat.

If any woman feels she needs something beyond herself to legitimize and validate her existence, she is already giving up her power of self-definition, her agency.