Faith & Spirit Quote by Smokey Robinson

Mortality is the quiet bassline under Smokey Robinsons sentence: all the stuff we chase, stack, and show off does not make it past the exit. Coming from a musician whose career helped soundtrack American longing, the line lands less like a sermon than a plea for calibration. Its intent is practical, almost managerial: if youre going to invest in anything, invest in the part of you that survives the applause, the money, the tour bus, the headlines.

The wording does sly work. "The only thing" is a hard edit, a refusal of sentimental loopholes. "Taking out of here" sounds like a nightclub closing time, or a hospital hallway, or the end of a set: whatever you thought you owned gets left behind. Then he pivots to "we need to be conscious" - not "pure" or "saved", but awake. Thats a Motown kind of spirituality: less doctrine, more discipline, a daily practice of attention.

The subtext is also an industry critique. Robinson came up in a machine built to extract: talent, youth, privacy, even identity. Against that backdrop, "spirit and soul" reads as worker protection for the inner life. He is pointing to what fame can corrode - empathy, humility, steadiness - and calling it development, like a craft.

Context matters: this is a Black musical elder speaking in a culture that routinely commodifies Black feeling while denying Black interiority. By insisting "were all spiritual creatures", Robinson universalizes without flattening; he asserts a common human core as a rebuke to systems that price people by output.