John Lennon

Work is life, you know, and without it, there’s nothing but fear and insecurity.

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted.

Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

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.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage – the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

Upon retiring, sleep as if you had entered your last sleep. Upon awakening, leave your bed behind you instantly as if you had cast away a pair of old shoes.

What you do today can improve all your tomorrows.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.