Bell Hooks Quotes

He who integrates is lost.

Without education, you’re not you and I’m not me.

Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.

I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

Many people dedicate their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like, rather than actualizing themselves. This difference between self-actualization and self-image actualization is very important. Most people live only for their image

When I dropped out [from a law school], everybody was disappointed... But I found that disappointing people is a good thing, because disapproval is freedom. Before that, I never realized how much I sought other people's approval. Once I figured that out, I was free to move on and seek the approval of other people, in comedy clubs and showbiz meetings.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find your inner motivation to seek for new ideas on your own.

Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own-be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.

People tried to make me something that I wasn't at the beginning of my career.

We're all just trying to fit in and find ourselves, particularly when we're growing up.

At which point should we let go and do what we want to do, and when should we submit to rules? Coming to terms with our true natures and who we really are has always been a fascination to humans. I know it fascinates me.

I actually was rebelling as all young adults tend to do at or around the age of 19, to experiment with their lives and have fun.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.

We all need a firm sense of identity.

I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.

You cannot belong to anyone else, until you belong to yourself.

Every day I have many choices to make about who I want to be.

I'm still very much Kate.

Where you grew up becomes a big part of who you are for the rest of your life. You can't run away from that. Well, sometimes the running away from it is what makes you who you are.

We need a place in which we may flourish and be ourselves.

I have stepped off the relationship scene to come to terms with myself. I have spent most of my adult life being 'someone's girlfriend', and now I am happy being single.

Growing up in the '50s and being in the '60s, in that revolutionary time space, I thought freedom was what I was looking for. Slowly but surely, it became clear that the last thing I was interested in was freedom. Because if you're going to be free, you have to be free from something.

When I was 11, I realised that I did not have to live the life my mother had: school, marriage, children, apartment, summer house.