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 change the world; you can't fix the whole environment. But you can recycle. You can turn the water off when you're brushing your teeth. You can do small things.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Small actions can lead to positive change in the world.
This quote by Patti Smith emphasizes the importance of individual actions in effecting change, suggesting that while one may feel powerless to change the entire world or environment, every small effort, like recycling or conserving water, contributes to a larger impact. It encourages personal responsibility and acknowledges that collective small actions can snowball into significant outcomes over time.
Themes
ChangeActionsResponsibilityEnvironmentSmall Things
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about environmental awareness, one might say, 'Remember, you can't change the world; but you can recycle.'
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
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Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.
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