I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
Patti SmithRead
Artists, musicians, scientists - if you have any kind of visionary aptitude, it's often something that you don't have a choice in. You have to do it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creative individuals often feel compelled to pursue their passions as a necessity rather than a choice.
In this quote, Patti Smith emphasizes that those with a visionary aptitude, such as artists, musicians, and scientists, are driven by an intrinsic need to create and innovate. It suggests that their talents and passions are not merely hobbies or professions but essential aspects of their identities that they cannot ignore, highlighting the powerful pull of creativity and discovery in their lives.
Themes
CreativityVisionNecessityArtPassion
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about innovation, you might quote this to emphasize the importance of pursuing one’s passions.
More from Patti Smith
All quotes →My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.
Patti SmithRead
For everything bad, there's a million really exciting things, whether it's someone puts out a really great book, there's a new movie, there's a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.
Patti SmithRead
Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.
Patti SmithRead
I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.
Patti SmithRead
No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.
Patti SmithRead
Similar quotes
My job in this life is to give people spiritual ecstasy through music. In my concerts people cry, laugh, dance. If they climaxed spiritually, I did my job. I did it decently and honestly.
Carlos SantanaRead
My desire as a storyteller is to always catch the readers off guard; to give them something they aren't expecting, and take them in a direction that is satisfying in the here and non.
Chris ClaremontRead
The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.
Le CorbusierRead
What counts in a good story is the person inside. Keep it simple.
Paulo CoelhoRead
People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
Claude DebussyRead
The idea of making audiences feel like they matter, that the theatre matters, and that they're a partner in the event—that's what fuels me as a director . . . I believe it's actually radical to think about the audience.
Diane PaulusRead