Patti Smith Quotes

No one knows when the man up above wants to call your name.

There is but one freedom, To put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved, and not the reverse.

In our dreams we are able to fly . . . and that is a remembering of how we were meant to be.

My soul is in the sky.

Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.

I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

This being busied with thoughts of immortality is for the noble classes and especially for women with nothing to do. A solid person, though, someone who already intends to be something worthy here, and who therefore has to strive daily, has to struggle and work, gives the world to come a rest.

Do you always believe in the life to come? Mine was always that.

We are such skeptics that we find it difficult to believe in God and angels and a spiritual afterlife, but a moment of fear makes our spirit so vulnerable that it allows us to believe in something beyond that.

Nothing feebler than a man does the earth raise up, of all the things which breathe and move on the earth, for he believes that he will never suffer evil in the future, as long as the gods give him success and he flourishes in his strength; but when the blessed gods bring sorrows too to pass, even these he bears, against his will, with steadfast spirit, for the thoughts of earthly men are like the day which the father of gods and men brings upon them.

Many have told me through the years: 'I think I'll take my chances without Jesus.' And I always come back and say, 'So what chance is that?'

When I'm killed, don't think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there's one thing that I know well, I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!

How many caskets can we witness before we see it's hard to live this life without God, so we must ask forgiveness.

I believe in life after death.

It is one thing to fall victim to the flood or to fall prey to cancer; it is another thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.

I don't fear death. I remember my last meeting with my father when he told me, "You know, tonight when I will be killed, my mother and my father will be waiting for me." It makes me weepy ... but I don't think it can happen unless God wants it to happen because so many people have tried to kill me.

I believe that every interaction is an act of fate in some way, that we're meant to interact with them, and it's our job to flesh that out and experience it to the fullest and learn the lessons we're meant to.

Tell them that as soon as I can walk I'm going to fly!

And when you start to think about death, you start to think about what's after it. And then you start hoping there is a God. For me, it's a frightening thought to go nowhere. I also can't believe that people like Stalin and Hitler are gonna go to the same place as Mother Teresa.

All mankind is one volume. When one man dies, a chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language. And every chapter must be translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God's hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall live open to one another

[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.

I believe that everybody, whether you believe in the afterlife or the chance of a near-death experience and you come back and you see someone [on the other side] - whether that has happened or not, I don't know, but certainly everyone has thought about it at some point or another in time. It's a fantasy that if there is anything out there like that, it would be just terrific, but that remains to be seen.

Now. Maybe you think it is arrogant or self centered, or ridiculous for me to believe that God bothered to wiggle a cheap bolt out of my new used car because he or she needed to keep me away for a few days until just the moment when my old friend most needed me to help her mother move into whatever comes next. Maybe nothing conscious helped to stall me so that I would be there when I could be most useful. Or maybe it did. I’ll never know for sure. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter.