We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.
—John Lennon
Topics: Love, Feelings
Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war—for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.
—John Lennon
Always remember this: ‘A kiss will never miss, and after many kisses a miss becomes a misses’.
—John Lennon
Topics: Kiss
My defenses were so great. The cocky rock and roll hero who knows all the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn’t know how to cry. Simple.
—John Lennon
Topics: Fear
There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.
—John Lennon
There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.
—John Lennon
Topics: Truth
You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.
—John Lennon
Topics: Ambition, Getting Ahead
Rituals are important. Nowadays it’s hip not to be married. I’m not interested in being hip.
—John Lennon
Topics: Marriage
Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.
—John Lennon
Topics: Feelings, Love
I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now? Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
—John Lennon
Topics: Belief, Reality, Imagination
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity.
—John Lennon
Topics: Religion, Christianity, Christians
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.
—John Lennon
Topics: Insanity, Madness
The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars peace, love, hate, all that. Unknown is what it is. Accept that it’s unknown, and it’s plain sailing.
—John Lennon
Topics: Acceptance, Fear, Doubt, Uncertainty
We’ve been on our peace gig, as we call it, for a year solid. And people say, ‘Do you think it’s having any effect?’ I can’t answer that. It’s like asking me in the Cavern, ‘Are you gonna make it?’ In the back of my mind I thought, I’m gonna make it, but I couldn’t lay it on the line. And I think that peace is more tangible than Beatles.
—John Lennon
Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.
—John Lennon
Topics: Nature, Living, Goals, Luck, Planning, Life, Busy
I realized that kids everywhere go for the same stuff; and seeing as we’d done it in England, there’s no reason why we couldn’t do it in America too.
—John Lennon
You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
—John Lennon
Topics: Peace
Everything is clearer when you’re in love.
—John Lennon
Topics: Love
A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality.
—John Lennon
My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
—John Lennon
Topics: The Artist
As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot
—John Lennon
If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.
—John Lennon
Topics: Television
When you’re thirty-five, you can’t take as much booze … and I always got a little violent on drink…So it was kind of self-destructive suicide side of me, which is resolving itself for the better, I believe, because I never enjoyed it…
—John Lennon
Topics: Drinking
And so this is Xmas for black and for white, for yellow and red, let’s stop all the fight.
—John Lennon
Topics: Racism, Race
All we are saying is give peace a chance…
—John Lennon
Topics: Peace
The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.
—John Lennon
Topics: Twentieth Century
I resent performing for frisking idiots who don’t know anything.
—John Lennon
Topics: Music
The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?
—John Lennon
Topics: Drugs
Work is life, you know, and without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity.
—John Lennon
Topics: Work
A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.
—John Lennon
Topics: Dreams
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Paul McCartney British Pop Musician
- George Harrison English Singer
- Keith Richards English Singer
- Bob Dylan American Musician
- Stevie Wonder American Singer, Songwriter
- Joan Baez American Singer
- Carole King American Singer
- Ray Charles American Singer
- Elvis Presley American Musician
- Billy Joel American Singer
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