Patti Smith Quotes

I'm a lot of things, but none of them are great.

But I learned that there's a certain character that can be built from embarrassing yourself endlessly. If you can sit happy with embarrassment, there's not much else that can really get to ya.

No one enjoys feeling weak, whether it is emotionally, spiritually or physically. There is something within the human spirit that wants to resist the thought of weakness. Many times this is nothing more than our human pride at work. Just as weakness carries a great potential for strength, pride carries an equally great potential for defeat.

If you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

People can hate on you for doing what it is that makes you happy, but ultimately it has to belong to you. It shouldn't matter what anyone else thinks.

Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

It's an inside job to learn about forgiving, it's an inside job to hang on to the joy of living.

Looking foolish does the spirit good.

Acceptance means no complaining, and happiness means no complaining about the things over which you can do nothing.

The happy man is he who knows his limitations, yet bows to no false gods.

The most certain mode of making people content with us is to make them content with themselves.

Vulnerability is not about fear and grief and disappointment; it is the birthplace of everything we're hungry for.

It's when you're not looking for anything that something winds up coming along. It's about learning how to be just with yourself and that you don't need to be in a relationship. You don't need anyone to fulfill you.

It's the hardest thing to be alone in being satisfied with what one's done.

I don't burden myself too much with others' expectations - or even my own expectations. I think your happiness grows in direct proportion to your acceptance, and in inverse proportion to your expectations. It's just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other - or doing the next right thing, so to speak.

Bottom line: If you love yourself, it will all work out.

I don't know if I would want to come back as anything but me. I feel really satisfied. I don't really want to be anyone else. I just feel like I've gotten everything I signed up for as me. I'm happy as me.

He was, he would be the first to admit, a coward, an incompetent, and not even very good at being a failure.

Popularity is when other people like you. Happiness is when you like yourself.

My life is perfect even when it's not.

You can be pleased with nothing if you are not pleased with yourself.

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.

My father's nature turned out no waste product; he had none of that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories. He took his own happiness with him.

Love who you are and what you are and what you do. Laugh at yourself and at life and nothing can touch you.

To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self...the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation.