Patti Smith Quotes

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you'd like to know.

I feel like if you read something, and it makes you so curious about a topic that you then go read something else, that's exciting.

I'm passionate about learning. I'm passionate about life.

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.

I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.

I've just tried to keep my eyes open, tried to read everything you can, and tried to see whether I see myself within it. If I do, then I can get excited about it.

Throughout my career as a lawyer, teacher and labor leader, books have remained my constant companion - stuffed into a briefcase, overflowing on my bedside table, stacked on my desk at work. Books have carried me to distant worlds, opened new doors and made me feel empathy, compassion, anger, fear, joy, acceptance - and everything in between.

What keeps me going are my learnings, which I would rather call my 'experience,' and my urge to explore.

I have this thirst for knowledge that I can't ever satisfy.

You should always think about things that excite you and that you can learn from.

This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.

I loved everything. I read everything. Art and poetry and literature and trash and sci fi. I didn't know what I would become yet and I needed to read to figure it out.

Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.

Writers are voracious readers. Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me. Everything was fair game, from Louisa May Alcott to my older cousin's True Romance Magazines, from Lewis Carroll to the backs of cereal boxes. All of this fed me, but it took certain books to make me grow. I don't want to work without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

Yeah, because I think it's more important just to inspire people to wake up one day and pick up a book and start feeling it out for themselves.

The older I get, the more my curiosity grows, and every book I write is a new exploration.

What better way to expand your imagination than to read!

A good education should leave much to be desired.