John Lennon

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.

I don’t intend to be a performing flea anymore. I was the dreamweaver, but although I’ll be around I don’t intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don’t want to die at 40.

He didn’t come out of my belly, but my God, I’ve made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us. And the world will live as one.

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and all achievement.

You’re only lonely if you’re not there for you.

The little I know I owe to my ignorance.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Instinct is probably the essence of past experience and knowledge stored up for later use. There are many, you know, who think that this life journey through the world is not the first one we have made. Haven’t you ever come across children who knew things that it was impossible for them to have learned? Have you ever gone to a place for the first time and felt sure that you had been there before? That’s one of the reasons I do not travel much.

Zen teaches that if we can open up to the inevitability of our demise, we can begin to transform and lighten up about it.

Scriptures, n.: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

I am become death, shatterer of worlds.

When you once get an idea in which you believe with all your heart, work it out.

If your neighbor has a completely different view on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, all of those things, you still are both Americans. Neither one of you is necessarily more patriotic than the other. Neither loves their country any more than the other one does.

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face.

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

I grew up in athletics, where people keep score.

Greatest thing we can produce is character. Everything else can be taken from us, but not our character.