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.
Interpretation
Life is filled with pain, and in difficult times, we seek greater understanding or support.
In this quote, John Lennon suggests that pain is an inherent part of the human experience from birth onward. He posits that when we experience profound suffering, our need for spiritual or external support—symbolized by 'gods'—intensifies, reflecting a deep reliance on something greater than ourselves to help us cope with the struggles of life.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a support group meeting to emphasize the need for community in times of distress.
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?
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.
Emotional life is - alongside work - one of the great challenges of existence and is a theme that I keep returning to.
Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
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