John Lennon

The worst drugs are as bad as anybody’s told you. It’s just a dumb trip, which I can’t condemn people if they get into it, because one gets into it for one’s own personal, social, emotional reasons. It’s something to be avoided if one can help it.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them…

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

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.

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.

To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

[On religion:] Wasn’t it invented by man for a kind of solace? It’s as though he had said, ‘I’ll make me a nice comfortable garment to shut out the heat and the cold,’ and then it ends by becoming a strait-jacket.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

Great morning!! Dear God, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for EVERYTHING! Especially my healthy baby girl!

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

The whole secret of existence is to have no fear.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean.

Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others is the ultimate source of success in life.

It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.