bell hooks Love Quotations

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.'

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.