49 Powerful Quotes from John Lennon to Live and Love By

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

When you do something beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun, every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.

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.

If everyone could just be happy with themselves and the choices people around them make, the world would instantly be a better place!

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.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be…

One thing you can’t hide – is when you’re crippled inside.

It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out.

There are no problems, only solutions.

Love is all you need.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realized that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

For those of you in the cheap seats I’d like ya to clap your hands to this one; the rest of you can just rattle your jewelry!

How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing?

My role in society, or any artist’s 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.

Nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that’s just barely possible.

What we’ve got to do is keep hope alive. Because without it we’ll sink.

Everything is as important as everything else.

If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that’s a problem. Peace and love are eternal.

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

Only by trying on other people’s clothes do we find what size we are.

Produce your own dream. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters.

I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!

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 be as one.

It’s weird not to be weird.

Get out there and get peace, think peace, and live peace and breathe peace, and you’ll get it as soon as you like.

When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind.

Happiness is just how you feel when you don’t feel miserable.

I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.

If you want peace, you won’t get it with violence.

Art is only a way of expressing pain.

You’re all geniuses, and you’re all beautiful. You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are.

I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

The more real you get, the more unreal the world gets.