Bono Quotes

People who know our music, they know who you are. They've been in the dark room, they know you better than your best friend, because you don't sing like that to your best friend, you don't sing in their ear.

I think that the camera loves peopke who ... loathe the camera (Bono)

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

ISIS and these kinds of extremists are a death cult. We're a life cult. Rock 'n' roll is a life force, and it's joy as an act of defiance.

The past is not a place I like to visit. This project is forcing me to go there, to tidy up my thoughts. I'm not normally a navel-gazer. I've always thought you find yourself in other people. I'm visiting here. I don't want to set up house.

For all that "I was lost, I am found," it is probably more accurate to say, "I was really lost, I'm a little less so at the moment.

I'm actually starting to like more and more people who have convictions that are unpopular.

God's Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm.

What you don't have you don't need it now
What you don't know you can feel it somehow
What you don't have you don't need it now
Don't need it now
It was a beautiful day.

I think ABBA have a pure joy to their music and that's what makes them extraordinary.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.

Facts, like people, want to be free - and when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner.

The less you know, The more you believe.

It's still very difficult for me to rely. Your weakness, the blessing of your weakness is it forces you into friendships. The things that you lack, you look for in others.

I have a room, which is in my brain, and it's very, very, very ... untidy! There is stuff fallen everywhere. There are some very important ideas next to dome very silly ones. There is a bottle of wine that was opened five years ago, and there is a lunch I haven't eaten from last summer. There are faces of children who are going to die but don't have to. There's my fathers face telling me to tidy up my room. So that's what I'm doing - tidying my room.

You've gotta be very careful that grace and politeness do not merge into a banality of behavior, where we're just nice, sort of 'death by cupcake.'

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

At a certain point, I just felt, you know, God is not looking for alms, God is looking for action.

As hard as it is, as ghetto as it is, hip-hop is pop music. It's the sound of music getting out of the ghetto, while rock is looking for a ghetto.

Even though I'm a believer, I still find it really hard to be around other believers. They make me nervous, they make me twitch. I sorta watch my back.

People rid the room of argument until they have no one left - except people who agree with them. It is understandable. But I like a good argument.

I don't let my religious world get too complicated.

Stop asking God to bless what you're doing. Find out what God's doing. It's already blessed.

So what you're left with is: either Christ was who He said He was - the Messiah - or a complete nutcase. I mean, we're talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. - Bono on whether Jesus was Son of God was far-fetched.

I'm as skeptical as anyone would be about celebrities and causes - and I will dare to say to you that I don't think of myself as a celebrity per se.

Anyone that's involved in development has discovered that all the good work that's been done in development has been undone by the AIDS emergency.

I put Catholic guilt to work pretty good for a rich rock star.

And I can't tell the difference between ABC News, Hill Street Blues
And a preacher on the old time gospel hour
Stealing money from the sick and the old
Well the God I believe in isn't short of cash, mister!

I'm a singer, not a politician, and I think you don't want the two to get confused. It's not OK to be on CNN talking about people starving and then tell the interviewer that your new album is coming out in six months.

Perspective is the cure for depression.

I used to - my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I've always heard kind of melodies in my head.

I can't change the world but I can change the world in me.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays ... and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

Sadly, I do my homework. I've a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I'll read C. Fred Bergsten's defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It's embarrassing to admit.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don't know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

U2 was involved in Live Aid, and I ended up going to Ethiopia and working there for some time with my wife, Ali.

I'm a musician. I write songs. I just hope when the day is done I've been able to tear a little corner off of the darkness.

Jesus, Jesus help me. I'm alone in this world ...

Because you know when you first become famous, you start walking a little different because people are staring at you.

I believe that Jesus was, you know, the Son of God. And I understand that ... we need to be really, really respectful to people who find that ridiculous and ... preposterous.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It's a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

There's a point where you find yourself tiptoeing as an artist, and then you know that you're in the wrong place.

Convictions, in the end, they can be dangerous, but a world without them is just kind of an awful kind of gray, amorphous mass.

Where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world.

Facebook are an amazing team, a brilliant team. It's a technology that brings people together.

So you cannot, as a Christian, walk away from Africa.

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.

The extraction of oil, coal and minerals brought, and still brings, a cost to the environment.

Marriage is this grand madness, and I think if people knew that, they would perhaps take it more seriously.

What we're about in this band, I hope ... is that we put people before ideas.

Rock stars are good at making noise.

Jesus isn't lettin' you off the hook. The Scriptures don't let you off the hook so easily ... When people say, you know, 'Good teacher', 'Prophet', 'Really nice guy' ... this is not how Jesus thought of Himself.

With all singers, insecurity is your best security. That's why we're such loud people and why we walk all funny. You think, 'Are people interested?' But I think our band has something and they know we don't just put albums out. We do think about it.

Religion to me almost like when God leaves – and people devise a set of rules to fill in the space.

Laughter is eternity if joy is real.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

What's so powerful about the Psalms are, as well as they're being gospel and songs of praise, they are also the blues.

If September 11th has taught us anything, it's certainly that the world has never been so interdependent. It is impossible now to be an island of prosperity in a sea of despair.

blessed are the stupid who can dream

I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don't read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2's audience.

It's much easier to be successful than it is to be relevant. The tricks won't keep you relevant. Tricks might keep you popular for a while, but in all honesty, I don't know how U2 will stay relevant. I know we've got a future. I know we can fill stadiums. And yet with every record, I think, 'Is this it? Are we still relevant?'

The strangest thing has happened. I really missed my dog. That's never happened to me before. You know, on a long tour you do hear people saying they miss their pets. I never have. But last night I started really missing my dog.
It's very odd, 'cause I don't have a dog.

Where you live should not determine whether you live, or whether you die.

So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.

The most powerful idea that's entered the world in the last few thousand years - the idea of grace - is the reason I would like to be a Christian.

There is a root arrogance in any writer; a hugely arrogant assumption that anyone is going to listen to them.

In my view, the only thing worse than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience.

If you stop taking chances, you'll stay where you sit. You won't live any longer, but it'll feel like it.

We're starting our own religion at last. The Order of Frisbeetarians. We believe that when you die, your soul ascends to a rooftop and you can never get it back.

We can't fix all problems but we must fix the ones we can

I'm the man that brought you the mullet.

But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that's why we came to America.

In my dream, I was drowning my sorrows
But my sorrows they learned to swim

I dont know you. And you don't know the half of it.

It's a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

Essentially, I'm a very real person; good and bad. And the public image is one of being very good, I suppose. But one of the reasons I'm attracted to people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Christ, to pacifism, is because naturally, I'm the guy that would not turn the other cheek - but, when people see you're attracted to that, they think you are that.

The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.

I am a Christian - but sometimes I feel very removed from Christianity. The Jesus Christ that I believe in was the man who turned over the tables in the temple and threw the money-changers out - substitute T.V. evangelists if you like ... why in the West, do we spend so much money on extending the arms race instead of wiping out malaria, which could be eradicated given ten minutes worth of the world's arm budget? To me, we are living in the most un-Christian times. When I see these racketeers, the snake-oil salesmen on these right-winged television stations, asking for not your $20.00, or your $50.00, but your $100.00 in the name of Jesus Christ, I just want to throw up!!

Celebrity is ridiculous and silly and it's mad that people like me are listened to - you know, rap stars and movie stars.

I don't like the name, U2, actually.

When you truly accept that those children in some far off place in the global village have the same value as you in God's eyes or even in just your eyes, then your life is forever changed; you see something that you can't un-see.

I do see the good in people, but I also see the bad
I see it in myself. I know what I'm capable of. Good and bad. It's very imnportant that we make that clear. Just because I often find a way around the darkness doesn't mean tjat I don't know it's there. (Bono)

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.

I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people we're a pop band. People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn't being ironic.

The great music for so many artists - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones - was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

If your heart was hard, that would be better / You could only break it once or twice / After that it would be rid of blood and you could let it turn to ice.

One Life, with each other, Sisters, Brothers...

babe, it must be art

I think I have a kind of Tourette's syndrome where if you're not supposed to say something, it becomes very attractive to do so. You're in a rock band – what can't you talk about? God? Okay, here we go. You're supposed to write songs about sex and drugs. Well, no I won't.

I'm never nervous when I go to meet heads of state. I feel they should be nervous, because they are the ones who'll be held accountable for the lives their decisions will impact the most.

The God I believe in isn't short on cash, mister.

You don't become an 'artist' unless you've got something missing somewhere. Blaise Pascal called it a God-shaped hole. Everyone's got one but some are blacker and wider than others. It's a feeling of being abandoned,cut adrift in space and time-sometimes following the loss of a loved one. You can never completely fill that hole-you can try with songs,family,faith and by living a full life ... but when things are silent, you can still hear the hissing of what's missing.

In general people put too much faith in the rich, the famous, the politicians, and not enough faith in themselves.

Rock 'n' roll is ridiculous. It's absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we're wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

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.

Let's not bequeath the pop charts to just children.

Africa will thrive.

It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.