Bell Hooks Quotes

All big changes of the world come from words.

You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change - it can not only move us, it makes us move.

Words can have the same kind of magic as riffs can.

There is no force so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

No revolution that has ever taken place in society can be compared to that which has been produced by the words of Jesus Christ.

Very few people transform their country.

I want the power that comes from expressing myself creatively and putting something back into the world. Being someone's muse would be flattering, but it could get old fast.

You must continue. Poets are the ones who change the world.

A good piece of art should make a revolution inside you.

To change the world you'll need a pen.

We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable.

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

Not to admire, is all the art I know To make men happy, or to keep them so. Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago; And thus Pope quotes the precept to re-teach From his translation; but had none admired, Would Pope have sung, or Horace been inspired?

Art can compel people freely, gladly, and spontaneously to sacrifice themselves in the service of man.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

When we read the right book generously, it can change the way think about the world around us.

The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.

One play can change your momentum forever.

I've always been doing stuff, being creative. But I got to the point where I starting to feel this longing, craving, itchy feeling - which was the first sign that it was time. I've made a few attempts to make other solo records, but when I've looked back at the body of work I've always felt like I was never quite there.

To speak a true word is to transform the world.