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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the complexities of wealth and the deeper needs for love and peace in life.
John Lennon expresses a sense of guilt that comes with being wealthy, suggesting that material possessions can lead to existential doubts. He contrasts this with a deeper desire for love and peace, hinting that merely being rich may not fulfill one's inner needs, and it even might provoke harmful thoughts or actions, indicating a conflict between external success and internal fulfillment.
In practice
During a charity event, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of love over wealth.
When I get older losing my hair many years from now. Will you still be sending me a Valentine. Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? If I'd been out till quarter to three would you lock the door? Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I'm sixty-four?
The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature, more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote together as teenagers and in our older twenties.
I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.
I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.
I've been baking bread and looking after the baby...Everyone else who has asked me that question over the last few years says. 'But what else have you been doing?' To which I say, 'Are you kidding?' Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job. After I made the loaves [of bread,] I felt like I had conquered something. But as I watched the bread being eaten, I thought, Well, Jesus, don't I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?
We all been playing those mind games forever, Some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil, Doing the mind guerrilla, Some call it magic the search for the grail. Love is the answer and you know that for sure, Love is a flower you got to let it grow...
The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.
they go and set up free-will with the heathen philosophers and say that a man's free will is the cause why God chooseth and not another, contrary to all scriptures.
Let go, and move closer to existence in silence and peace, in meditation.
Before the tribunal of nature, a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence, if he can find within himself the powers with which to do it.
The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that-however bloody-can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.
All things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.