Bell Hooks Quotes

The problem with educating stupid people was that they didn’t know they were stupid. The same went for curing crazy people.

I feel like people can feel when something is natural. I think they can tell.

I think individual people are interesting, not really groups of people.

When I'm in there I'm just in my zone. What people think about when they're looking at me, that's their business. If there is a bit of that, I am fine with it, each to his own.

If you think you are the entire picture, you will never see the big picture.

A good many people think as I do. If they like my work they are creative . . . or they are crazy.

Meditation is not contemplation because it is not thinking at all - consistent, inconsistent, crazy, sane. It is not thinking at all; it is witnessing. It is just sitting silently deep within yourself, looking at whatsoever is happening inside and outside both. Outside there is traffic noise, inside there is also traffic noise - the traffic in the head. So many thoughts - trucks and buses of thoughts and trains and airplanes of thoughts, rushing in every direction. But you are simply sitting aloof, unconcerned, watching everything with no evaluation.

I really can't tell other people how to live their life or how to approach different things. What I can tell them - and I truly believe this, I don't think it's being naïve and I don't think it's being in denial - I really believe that the way you think influences the way you feel, and the way you feel influences the way you act.

I think when I started modeling three years ago, it was just a job, and I was so excited - everything was so new, so crazy. I didn't overthink anything; I just did it and enjoyed myself along the way. But after a few seasons, you get used to it, and there's a lot you actually have to think about, and, I don't know, it just makes you much more aware of what you look like and what other people think. It's a bit of a nightmare.

I don't know that it makes any difference whether it's at this time or a hundred years before or a hundred years later. I think always it's a matter of simply listen[ing] to what is going on around you and in your own experience. Try to understand what's happening, or if not to understand it, at least to appreciate the reality of it.

Don't think of people in the mass. That gives you a blurred view.

I don't know if people in New York recognize me or not. I'm not really conscious of it. If somebody stops me, then I suddenly realize that people are looking at me, but other times they may be doing it and I don't even know because I'm engrossed in something else.

I don't have all that great an awareness of how people see me in life. I don't find myself thinking about it a lot.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

Maybe I'm seeing myself in a different way than the people in the audience see me, 'cause to me, I think I look like a ballerina and I feel like a ballerina. But maybe I'm not seeing what other people are seeing.

Most people have no sense of self-awareness. They're not aware of what they really want. They knew it when they were younger but then as they get older they listened to parents, they listened to peers and they think that, for instance, money is the most important thing when it really isn't.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

Do you think that people ever really do believe they will die, that the world will just go along as always without them? I wonder if we aren't all a little surprised at the moment of crossover, if we don't look back over our shoulders saying, Now hold on.

There's still always the possibility that I've gone totally, clinically cuckoo. But somehow I don't think so anymore. An article I once read said that crazy people don't worry about being crazy - that's the whole problem.

People with humility don't think less of themselves, they just think of themselves less.

I think when you're writing from your own life, it's hard because you realize that people have their own assessment of how they look, and they don't know how you will describe them.

Many people mistakenly suppose that the essence of consciousness is that of a control mechanism

I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul... Now I think that the vast majority of us "normal" people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered.

I have to be pretty inclusive. I have to be pretty much inside of me rather than going out and finding out what people are doing. I don't have the time to. I just listen to my mind, in a way.

The biggest challenge is people thinking you know everything going on in your company, because you're at the top of it and you started it. But the thing is, nobody knows everything about anything.