There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.
Interpretation
Fear and love are the primary motivators of human behavior, influencing how we engage with life.
In this quote, John Lennon highlights the dichotomy between fear and love as the driving forces behind our actions and experiences. He suggests that when fear dominates, it restricts our potential and causes us to retreat from life's possibilities. In contrast, love encourages openness, passion, and a willingness to embrace life fully, suggesting that our attitude shapes our experience significantly.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about personal growth and relationships.
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.
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.
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?
Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.
Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?
If I never see you again I will always carry you inside outside on my fingertips and at brain edges and in centers centers of what I am of what remains.
I have too much respect for people to try to control them. But they are estranged from love, afraid to reach out and touch one another. We're afraid to appear sentimental or speak in platitudes because people will say, 'What a jerk!' It takes courage in our culture to be a lover.
One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight;_x000D_ _x000D_ Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight.
But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.
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