John Lennon Quotes

134 Sourced Quotes

I heard the news today, oh boy.
Four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire.
And though the holes were rather small,
They had to count them all.

John Lennon
I've always considered my work one piece and I consider that my work won't be finished until I am dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time.

John Lennon
She told me she worked in the morning And started to laugh, I told her I didn't And crawled off to sleep in the bath. And when I awoke I was alone, This bird had flown. So I lit a fire, Isn't it good Norwegian wood.

John Lennon
I think a label like "avant-garde" defeats itself. You learn to have avant-garde exhibitions. The very fact that avant-garde can have an exhibition defeats the purpose of avant-garde, because it's already formalised and ritualised.

John Lennon
There's a shadow hanging over me,
Oh yesterday came suddenly.

John Lennon
The dream is over...
I was the Dreamweaver But now I'm reborn I was the Walrus But now I'm John.

John Lennon
There's only one person in the United States we ever wanted to meet … not that he wanted us. And we met him last night. We can't tell you how we felt. We just idolised him so much. … You can't imagine what a thrill that was last night. Nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis. If there hadn't been an Elvis, there wouldn't have been the Beatles.

John Lennon
These critics with the illusions they've created about artists — it's like idol worship. They only like people when they're on their way up … I cannot be on the way up again. … What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I'm not interesting in being a dead (expletive) hero. … So forget 'em, forget 'em.

John Lennon
I've had cocaine, but I don't like it. The Beatles had lots of it in their day, but it's a dumb drug, because you have to have another one 20 minutes later. Your whole concentration goes on getting the next fix. Really, I find caffeine is easier to deal with. … A little mushroom or peyote is not beyond my scope, you know, maybe twice a year or something. You don't hear about it anymore, but people are still visiting the cosmos. We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That's what people forget. … They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.

John Lennon
Nothing you can know that isn't known Nothing you can see that isn't shown Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be It's easy

John Lennon
My original idea for the cover was better - decapitate Paul - but he wouldn't go along with it.

John Lennon
I can't remember anything without a sadness so deep that it hardly becomes known to me, so deep that its tears leave me a spectator of my own stupidity.

John Lennon
I've got used to the fact -​ just about -​ that whatever I do is going to be compared to the other Beatles. If I took up ballet dancing, my ballet dancing would be compared with Paul (McCartney)'s bowling.

John Lennon
I think it's the best thing I've ever done. I think it's realistic, and it's true to the me that has been developing over the years. I like first-person music.

John Lennon
I believe that God is like a powerhouse, like where you keep electricity, like a power station. And that he's a supreme power, and that he's neither good not bad, left, right, black or white. He just is. And we tap that source of power and make of it what we will. Just as electricity can kill people in a chair, or you can light a room with it. I think God is.

John Lennon
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are great examples of fantastic nonviolents who died violently. I can never work that out. We're pacifists, but I'm not sure what it means when you're such a pacifist that you get shot. I can never understand that.

John Lennon
I can't speak for George, but I pretty damn well know we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul.

John Lennon
People never grasp the fact that they're going to have to go through the same thing again. They get to the sort of five-year stretch or the seven-year itch or whatever these tension points are that seem to be organic, built in, like the tide coming in and going out. It's like every time the tide goes out you quit--you move your house or something.

John Lennon
I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off.

John Lennon
Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the wayThat's another piece of garbage. What the hell's it based on? We couldn't've come from anything-fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don't believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren't monkeys changing into men now? It's absolute garbage. It's absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists.

John Lennon
Everything they told me as a kid has already been disproved by the same type of experts who made them up in the first place.

John Lennon
You're born in pain and pain is what we're in most of the time. And I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need.

John Lennon
In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around.

John Lennon
As in a love affair, two creative people can destroy themselves trying to recapture that youthful spirit, at twenty-one or twenty-four, of creating without even being aware of how it's happening

John Lennon
When I was singing about 'All You Need Is Love' I was talking about something I hadn't experienced.

John Lennon