Bono Quotes

The Lives of Others.

— that we humans have little or no influence on the two most important moments of our life. Being born and dying. That felt like the right kind of fuck-you to the universe that a great punk rock song requires.

Service, ambition, duty, loyalty, the desire to be the best, the desire to say yes — not such bad character traits to have cherished. I always thought of them as strengths, but lately I wonder if somewhere along the line they became a cover for something more suspicious. The demand to be at the center of the action. To make God in our own image, to help her across the road as if she were a little old lady. This perpetual longing to be filled with the extraordinary so that you begin to lose appreciation for the ordinary.

I have climbed highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven't found what I'm kooking for

Peace is the opposite of dreaming. It’s built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don’t even see. It’s a messy business, bringing peace into the world.

Can I take in the view without having to be in it? Can I not take that call, in favor of this other call, to stillness? Is this what vision over visibility looks like now?

You’re owned by your ideas.

It is such an important idea, Jubilee, that Jesus begins his ministry with this. Jesus is a young man, he's met with the rabbis, impressed everyone, people are talking. The elders say, he's a clever guy, this Jesus, but he hasn't done much... yet. He hasn't spoken in public before... When he does, his first words are from Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," he says, "because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor." And Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord's favour, the year of Jubilee. [Luke 4:18] What he was really talking about was an era of grace — and we're still in it.

Christians are hard to tolerate; I don’t know how Jesus does it

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.

I was in my room listening on headphones on a tape recorder. It's very intimate. It's like talking to somebody on the phone, like talking to John Lennon on the phone. I'm not exaggerating to say that. This music changed the shape of the room. It changed the shape of the world outside the room; the way you looked out the window and what you were looking at. I remember John singing "Oh My Love." It's like a little hymn. It's certainly a prayer of some kind — even if he was an atheist. "Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes can see/I see the wind/Oh, I see the trees/Everything is clear in our world." For me it was like he was talking about the veil lifting off, the scales falling from the eyes. Seeing out the window with a new clarity that love brings you. I remember that feeling. Yoko came up to me when I was in my twenties, and she put her hand on me and she said, "You are John's son." What an amazing compliment!

Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.

I was in that room. It might have been a rehearsal room as a new song dropped by, but soon enough it was a walk down a country lane. “Now,” said the doctor, continuing. “Pull out the feeling that makes you feel safest and strongest and describe it for me.” “I’m walking along a river with my best friend,” I said. “And everything is just as it should be. I have confidence in my footsteps; I feel I am learning judgment but not being judged. I can say anything I want. Sometimes there’s a reply; sometimes there’s not. It’s just a conversation between friends.” “And your friend,” inquired the doctor. “Who is it?” I said, “I think it’s Jesus.” I heard the doctor shuffle, nervously, in his seat. Maybe I wasn’t that deep in his hypnosis. And he asked, “Where are you?” I said, “I’m just walking down a country lane by a river. It’s not the Tolka or the Liffey or even the Mississippi. Could it be the Jordan? I’ve always had a thing about the river Jordan.” Emerging from this “deep relaxation,” I could sense that the great physician had not expected me to find Jesus in my bottom drawer. The doctor was polite

Carl Jung observed that the very things that made you successful in the first half of your life not only no longer

Carl Jung observed that the very things that made you successful in the first half of your life not only no longer work for you in the second half; they positively work against you. The Franciscan friar Richard Rohr put it to me like this: “It’s our strengths rather than our weaknesses that often hold us back.