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
You can't carve up the world. It's not a pie.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The world is not a limited resource that can be divided and owned; it is vast and interconnected.
Patti Smith's quote emphasizes the idea that the world and its resources cannot be owned or segmented in the same way one would divide a pie. It suggests a philosophical understanding of our relationship with the world—highlighting the importance of interconnectivity and the shared nature of our existence, rather than viewing it as something to be parceled out and controlled.
Themes
WorldResourcesInterconnectednessPhilosophyOwnership
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about environmental sustainability, one might use this quote to illustrate the need for collective stewardship of the planet.
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.
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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.
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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
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