Patti Smith Quotes

If you don't have what you need, just rock with what you've got!

Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.

Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.

You can't make a mistake when you improvise.

My mission is to communicate, to wake people up, to give them my energy and accept theirs. We're all in it together, and I respond emotionally as a worker, a mother, an artist, and a human being with a voice. We all have a voice. We have the responsibility to exercise it, to use it.

We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.

To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.

Put down your cell phones, put everything away, and feel your blood pulsing in you, feel your creative impulse, feel your own spirit, your heart, your mind. Feel the joy of being alive and free.

I daydream a lot - that's how I get my ideas. If I'm sitting in a café, I'm not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important.

As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag.

Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.

For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.

I like my time on earth. And no matter what kind of cards I've been dealt, I'm happy to be there.

Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.

Freedom is...the right to write the wrong words.

If we keep our little flame alive, our first feeling of enthusiasm of who we are, without the influence or intervention of others, we will prevail.

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned about doing good work. Protect your work and if you build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency. Life is like a roller coaster ride, it is never going to be perfect. It is going to have perfect moments and rough spots, but it’s all worth it.

Swift is the arrow, dark is the thorn, the slate is clean, the future awaits, awake.

People have the power to redeem the work of fools.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.

Got to lose control before you take control.

Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line -- you have your own interior world, and it's not neat.

I'm right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age ...if only each generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive ... the time to flower is now.

Art is by nature optimistic. Art is optimistic because it is alive.

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.