bell hooks, a distinguished scholar, cultural critic, feminist theorist, and author, has profoundly impacted discussions on race, gender, and class.
Born Gloria Jean Watkins — she adopted her pen name from her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks — choosing lowercase letters to focus attention on her ideas rather than her identity.
Her work — characterized by its clear and accessible style, delves into the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender — highlighting how they produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination.
Throughout her life, hooks wrote more than 30 books, ranging from scholarly works to children’s literature, all of which explore themes of love, hope, community, and the necessity of a transformative ethic of love and solidarity in overcoming social injustices.
Her quotes resonate with a wide audience, offering profound insights into the nature of our society and ways we can cultivate more compassionate and equitable communities.
In this article, we’ve curated bell hooks’ most memorable quotes. Whether you’re seeking inspiration, guidance, or a deeper understanding of social dynamics, bell hooks’ words continue to enlighten and challenge us to think more critically about the world around us.
The Best Quotes from bell hooks
Famous Quotes
“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”
— bell hooks
“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.”
— bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.”
— bell hooks
“My students tell me, we don’t want to love! We’re tired of being loving! And I say to them, if you’re tired of being loving, then you haven’t really been loving, because when you are loving you have more strength.”
— bell hooks
On Love
“Living simply makes loving simple.”
— bell hooks
“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment… ‘dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems, or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love — which is to transform us.’ Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”
— bell hooks
“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“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.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice… We yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society. This book tells us how to return to love.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Giving generously in romantic relationships, and in all other bonds, means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an important resource.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“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.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
On Education
“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created.”
— bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
“To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. The school was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.”
— bell hooks
“All of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions — and society — so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom.”
— bell hooks
“My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers, we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.”
— bell hooks
On Oppression
“Being oppressed means the absence of choices.”
— bell hooks
“Within the new self-help books for women, patriarchy and male domination are rarely identified as forces that lead to the oppression, exploitation, and domination of women. Instead, these books suggest that individual relationships between men and women can be changed solely by women making the right choices.”
— bell hooks
“Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves ‘oppressed,’ no one would have taken them seriously.”
— bell hooks
“What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.”
— bell hooks
“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
“White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or... and oppression of others.”
— bell hooks
On Family
“I love my family, even as I critique their dysfunctionalities.”
— bell hooks
“Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish.”
— bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
“Healthy families resolve conflict without coercion, shaming, or violence.”
— bell hooks
On Self-Love
“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.”
— bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn’t it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim ‘You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself’ made clear sense. And I add, ‘Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself’”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“In an ideal world we would all learn in childhood to love ourselves. We would grow, being secure in our worth and value, spreading love wherever we went, letting our light shine. If we did not learn self-love in our youth, there is still hope. The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite, waiting for the heart to awaken and call us back to the first memory of being the life force inside a dark place waiting to be born - waiting to see the light.”
— bell hooks
→ Read more quotes about self-love
On Change
“True resistance begins with people confronting pain… and wanting to do something to change it.”
— bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
— bell hooks
“Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.”
— bell hooks
“When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth.”
— bell hooks
→ Read more quotes about change
On Social Justice
“Justice is possible without equality, I believe, because of compassion and understanding. If I have compassion, then if I have more than you, which is unequal, I will still do the just thing by you.”
— bell hooks
“Individual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts.”
— bell hooks
“Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.”
— bell hooks, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism
→ Read more quotes about social justice
On Community
“One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.”
— bell hooks
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“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.”
— bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies
“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”
— bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.”
— bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
— bell hooks
On Feminism
“Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”
— bell hooks
“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”
— bell hooks
“Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and practice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.”
— bell hooks
“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.”
— bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
“No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much’. Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’... No woman has ever written enough.”
— bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
“Feminism has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually — women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority.”
— bell hooks
“If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
— bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
→ Read more feminist quotes and quotes to empower women
More Quotes
“Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“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
“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is — it’s to imagine what is possible.”
— bell hooks
