Bono Surrender Quotes

You can disagree on everything but still work together on one thing... if that one thing is important enough.

Someone has likened prayer to being on a rough sea in a small boat with no oars. All you have is a rope that, somewhere in the distance, is attached to the port. With that rope you can pull yourself closer to God. Songs are my prayers.

My fear is that I/we have fallen asleep in the comfort of our freedom.

It takes great faith to have no faith.

Climbing into the ring, the best-prepared fighter is the one who has tried to understand their opponent. Especially if it’s yourself.

I mostly find religiosity annoying, right up at the top of the annoying is the pigheaded certainty of the devout without the doubt.

If you’re not at the table you’re on the menu?

The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice. It has to be bent, and this requires sheer force of will. It demands our sharpest focus and most concentrated effort. History does not move in a straight line; it has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, all the way down the line.

Fame is a currency. I want to spend mine on the right stuff.

Well, while I hope God is with those of us who live such comfortable lives, I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable.

Wailing, keening, trying to explain the unexplainable. Trying to release himself and anyone who will listen from the prison of a human experience that cannot explain grief.

Failure is when you give your enemies the confirmation, they were right all along to have you in their shit list,

your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough.

There's stuff you can learn from people who don't tell you anything.

I’m not sure a professional psychologist would agree, but something in me understands that until we deal with our most traumatic traumas, there’s a part of us that stays at the age at which we encountered them.

There’s stuff you can learn from people who don’t tell you anything. Like how not to react when there is a crisis. Like how to stay still and maybe even unearth levity from the seriousness of a situation. Edge is the silence inside every noise. He’s the light inside the paint.

The elephant in the room" is a phrase I enjoy, having at different times been either elephant or room. We can lose ourselves in situations or conversations and miss the obvious. We're looking for someone to save us or a solution to a problem, and they're right in front of us hiding in plain sight.

I hadn't done drugs since sniffing Lady Esquire shoe polish when I was fifteen. I didn't need to. I felt the pinch of wonder.

When you’re open, a hitchhiker—a “randomer,” as my daughter Eve calls them—can become an angel.

I'm lost, I'll probably always be lost.

We can debate whether information or matter is at the heart of the physical universe, but there is no argument that the essential building block of the rock 'n' roll solar system is the van.

--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.

The search for common ground starts with the search for higher ground, even with your opponents, especially with your opponents...You don't have to agree on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough.

Suicide offers quick authority over a life that feels it has lost all agency.

Songs are my prayer

The stuff of the great operas. U2’s music was never really rock ’n’ roll. Under its contemporary skin it’s opera—a big music, big emotions unlocked in the pop music of the day.

I'd given myself a license to look back, to lift up stones under which I knew lay creepy-crawlies.

...we'd rather not play the role of best friends. We'd rather be best friends, and that meant being truthful. Friendship is not a sentimental business.

The moment of surrender is the moment you choose to lose control of your life, the split second of powerlessness where you trust that some kind of "higher power" better be in charge, because you certainly aren't.

and still am, suspicious of the idea of oneness. I don’t buy into the homogeneity of the human experience. I don’t think we’re all one. We can be one, but I don’t think we have to see things the same way for that to be so. An anarchic thought: We’re one but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, not that we’ve got to, just that we get to.

Our work is borders, crossing them. Borders are a big attraction for me, leaving one country on the way to another, leaving one thought on the way to another, leaving our teens for our twenties, leaving East for West Germany. The liminal is the place to be. The bleeding edge. The demilitarized zones of the psyche, the gray ones of the heart. No-man’s-land is yes-man’s-land.

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.

Doing my homework one day, in the little box room in Cedarwood Road, I looked out the window as Guck Pants went by on a unicycle. Playing the trumpet.

I’m also deeply conscious that I can’t live up to the badge I’ve pinned to my lapel. I’m a follower of Christ who can’t keep up.

I’m drawn to conversation because in the best kind you don’t know where you’re going, only that you will get somewhere good.

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.

You torture me. I try to control you. We fall out. We don’t speak, and then we go through difficult years. You come out of those years, and then we meet up in your twenties, and then we get close again.” That’s how it often goes, I explain. On the other hand I will add, “We could just, say, skip all that.” And all of them went, “Yeah, let’s skip that.” And they did. Although, of course, if you talk to their mother, who didn’t go off on the road like their father, she might tell you a different story about how the girls might have missed out on me being there to torture and how I might have missed out on that too.

If you’re going to be famous, sure, be funny, be irreverent. Listen to the shouters as well as the whisperers. But above all, be useful. That was his modus, it always seemed to me, a modus that became a prayer in our family. Simple. Direct. Make us useful, dear God. We’re available. How can we be useful in this world where we find ourselves?

It’s an extraordinary thing, the moment of surrender. To get down on your knees and ask the silence to save you, to reveal itself to you. To kneel down, to implore, to throw yourself out into space, to quietly whisper or roar your insignificance. To fall prostrate and ask to be carried. To humble yourself with your family, your bandmates, and to discover if there’s a face or a name to that silence.

U2’s music was never really rock ’n’ roll. Under its contemporary skin it’s opera—a big music, big emotions unlocked in the pop music of the day. A tenor out front who won’t accept he’s a baritone. A small man singing giant songs. Wailing, keening, trying to explain the unexplainable. Trying to release himself and anyone who will listen from the prison of a human experience that cannot explain grief.

had an intolerance for what I perceived to be self-generated problems. In the past I’ve rushed to wrongheaded judgments. I could get angry if I saw people in corners of the world begging for a breath, fighting for their life through hunger or illness, and then see privileged people throwing their life away. I know this is deeply unsound thinking. I know people can be in such a dark place that they’ll do anything to escape it, including escaping this life itself. I know it’s not a loving response, but that was the furious me writing the lyric of “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of.” I will not forsake, the colours that you bring The nights you filled with fireworks They left you with nothing I am still enchanted by the light you brought to me I listen through your ears, And through your eyes I can see.

Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s done Showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So if, my dear, there sometimes seems to be Old bridges breaking between you and me Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall Confident that we have built our wall.

The poetry and politics of the Christmas story hit me as if I were hearing it for the first time: the idea that some force of love and logic inside this mysterious universe might choose self-disclosure in the jeopardy of one impoverished child, born on the edge of nowhere, to teach us how we might live in service to one another is overwhelming. Its eloquence is overwhelming. Unfathomable power expressed in powerlessness. I nearly laugh out loud. Genius. Inexpressible presence choosing to be present not in palace but in poverty.

On all the journeys I’ve taken, I’ve sought a guide. Even with the compass of faith I’m looking for the right company for the ride. For some spirit guide physicalized in a person. The sacrament of friendship. I’d first learned about friendship with Guggi and saw how it opened up my life to new possibilities and adventures. I discovered early that I was collaborative by nature. I began to understand that the world is not so scary if, around every significant corner, somebody is waiting to walk with you on the next part of the journey.

We enjoy the poetics but also know we can’t always live off our feelings. We’ve long intuited that a long-distance marathon like ours must be run on more than romance. We delight in each other enough that when we don’t, we still push each other to push through the pain barrier. To try to make it to the next level. Ali calls this “the work of love,” and maybe some days that’s shorthand for me being hard work. But she’s right: love is work. Good work. We may let the scaffolds fall, but we have built our wall. Ali gets fidgety when I get too serious. As I am now. Struggling to express how every day that we give to each other adds both weight and … weightlessness. Gravity and grace. Am I more desperate for our marriage to make it than Ali, who is never as desperate as her husband? I have the most to learn from this relationship, and one of the profoundest lessons it has taught me is in raising children. I’d had that blood-brother compact with my childhood friend Guggi to never grow up, but as Ali and I had kids, I slowly understood that you can’t have a child and remain a child. I really don’t like goodbyes, but sometimes you have to say goodbye.

but evidently disappointed. Instead of discovering the source of the vocal problems, he had uncovered the source of the messianic complex. I thanked him because I knew for sure these images were deeply comforting ones from childhood, from the Sunday singing of gospel songs like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” In truth, he would never know how he’d opened to me an experience that helped me understand myself. Why I view friendship as a kind of sacrament and how my traveling companion in the way of faith had metamorphosed from the father figure of the Old Testament to the companion and friend of the New Testament.

All musical instruments are useful for love and exhortation. Only one is essential for war. The drums. The drums are thin skin stretched tightly over hollow volumes, mostly of wood, which gives them their earthiness, their sexiness. Slapping without the tickling. The hand or the stick bounces across the skin of the drums, throwing the listener forward into a dance, into a physical response. For war, and in particular marching to war, wood was replaced by metal. The snare, as it’s known for good reason, supplies body armor to the already athletic muscular choices available. There is a particular violence built into the snare drum, and the rat-a-tat of a military tattoo was exactly what we were looking for with the opening of “Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Strikingly, only once does Jesus speak about judgment, and when he does, it’s about how we treat the poor: And they too will reply, “Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?” Then the King will answer, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.” And yet for some reason even now people of faith think that what’s going on in their—or other people’s—pants is more important to God than, say, what’s happening to the homeless. The lives of the poorest people are at the heart of Christianity, but sometimes religion seems to be what happens when Jesus, like Elvis, has left the building. It becomes a bless me club for the Holy Rollers and navel gazers.

Around that time, when the band was in Australia, I had a recurring voice problem and was advised to visit a doctor with a reputation for helping singers. The doctor had a sense that anxiety explained this constant sore throat rather than, as several of my nearest and dearest had suggested, the cheroots, the alcohol, and the talking into the small hours. It was in my interest to trust the good doctor, and because he also had such good references, I agreed to something I’d never previously agreed to. I allowed him to put me under hypnosis. Well, almost … “Imagine,” said the doctor, “a room with all your best memories around you. Be in the room. Now open the drawer. Find those memories. The best things that have ever happened to you. The affirmations. Your partner, your children, your best friends. A moment that changed your life’s direction. All the best things. Be in that room.

Over the years there have been times when I’ve been mesmerized by a figure in my imagination that I mistook for someone real. A crush that could have crushed my partner’s feelings. At such a moment, while you may not be in control of who or what is beguiling or besotting you, you are in control of what you do about those feelings. The choices you make. Romantic love can enlarge a person or shrink them. Sometimes the most convincing act of love is to just let someone be who they are. Without you. As a songwriter I am attracted to any territory or subject that’s just out-of-bounds, a someone or something new who might take my imagination by surprise. As a man too. This can be problematic. I can have a crush on a person who doesn’t exist. Ali finds other obstacles in the way of her love. Were there days when both of us might resent the obligations our marriage makes of each other? Sure, but neither of us would want to live outside each other’s love as expressed through this old-fashioned but still functional construct called marriage.

Surrender” might be the most powerful word in the world, but now I’m caught between the life I know and the one I don’t. Can I just take a walk on Killiney Hill with my best friend, who happens to be my wife, and sit on that wooden seat that overlooks the bay and not check the phone to see what’s going on somewhere else in 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? I bow to no one in my love and respect for Leonard Cohen, but I can’t see myself following him up that mountain on his Zen retreat. I’m not sure I’m made to climb that hill. But then the drip, drip, drip. I hear the words of another Sufi, the poet Rumi. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Maybe I’m discovering surrender doesn’t always have to follow defeat and may be all the fuller after victory. When you’ve won the argument you now understand you never needed to have. The argument with your life

Pop was to be popular music. Contemporary. Like Andy Warhol’s take on news events and celebrity. The big questions right next to the little ones. Our attempt to make the instant eternal. A series of Polaroids of this moment. To keep forever.

The names were supposed to describe the shape of your spirit as well as your physical characteristics.

I am a baritone who thinks he's a tenor.

Rock 'n' roll is the sound of revenge, all right.

I'm one in four, and a real rock 'n' roll band is not run by the singer. Led maybe, but not run.

Bono era una abreviatura de Bono Vox of O’Connell Street, pero de chaval Guggi no era ningún erudito del latín. La asociación con «Buena Voz» fue una grata coincidencia.

Bono Vox era una tienda de audífonos de Dublín.

Patricide. The stuff of the great operas. U2’s music was never really rock ’n’ roll. Under its contemporary skin it’s opera—a big music, big emotions unlocked in the pop music of the day. A tenor out front who won’t accept he’s a baritone. A small man singing giant songs.

story that will sketch out the first U2 album, Boy, including its cover and final track, “Shadows and Tall Trees,” which borrows its title from chapter 7 of the book:

Radar, his youngest brother, who appeared on the cover of two of U2’s early albums, Boy and War.

Guggi not only gave me the name Bono; he gave everyone in his family new and surreal names.

Bono was short for Bono Vox of O’Connell Street, but the boy Guggi was no Latin scholar. “Strong Voice” was an accidental translation. Bonavox was a hearing aid shop in Dublin.

Andrew Rowen would end up in three U2 songs, “Running to Stand Still,” as well as “Bad” and “Raised by Wolves.

It is not an exaggeration to say U2 began to write our own songs because we couldn’t play other people’s. Baby steps for a baby band.

now appreciate that that was a very Bob Dylan thing to do, to turn the tables completely. Bumping into Bob Dylan? What’s that like? It’s like bumping into Willie Shakespeare. I knew I was on hallowed ground, if not on solid ground. I was not worthy to tie the laces of his moccasins, but I caught my balance and challenged him to a chess game. That’s right—a chess game. Bob Dylan had invited me backstage, to

It’s important people don’t forget that the revolution in Russia began with the most noble ideals; my grandfather believed in those ideals.

Un trabajo es un sitio donde haces algo que, en el fondo, no te gusta durante unas ocho horas al día cinco o seis días a la semana a cambio de dinero que te permita hacer el fin de semana las cosas que te gustaría hacer todo el tiempo.

praying to find the intimacy of a band that could be useful to our audience this evening

The Bible Belt and its unchristian undertow leaving welts on the bare bottoms of unbelievers.

Yeats got it. O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Why I view friendship as a kind of sacrament and how my traveling companion in the way of faith had metamorphosed from the father figure of the Old Testament to the companion and friend of the New Testament.

If you’re where you should be, you’ll meet whom you need to meet.

The sorts of kids who write songs or poetry or paint pictures are the sorts of kids who feel too much at times. The sorts of kids whose feelings can overpower them.

Al subir al ring, el púgil más preparado es el que ha intentado conocer a su adversario. Sobre todo si eres tú mismo.

El fracaso es cuando les das la razón a tus enemigos al confirmarles que hacían bien en tenerte en la lista negra.

from U2’s point of view, John Hume was the Martin Luther King of the Irish Troubles. Hume also set up the credit union in Derry, which helped Catholics into housing in

In August 2020, when he passed, I wrote a micro eulogy for the service in St. Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry: We were looking for a giant and found a man who made all our lives bigger. We were looking for some superpowers and found clarity of thought, kindness, and persistence. We were looking for revolution and found it in parish halls with tea and biscuits and late-night meetings under fluorescence. We were looking for a negotiator who understood that no one wins unless everyone wins and loses something and that peace is the only victory.

You’re owned by your ideas.

Love. That’s a big word to throw around.

And I can tell you the division of our small island was much more to do with keeping Harland & Wolff in the union than to protect the Protestants.

There is anyway a kind of off-color romance to a deserted seaside town in the winter,

If she loves books, there is nowhere she can’t go;

If you’re the best thing about me then why am I walking away?

It’s our strengths rather than our weaknesses that often hold us back.

The answer, he told me, was to be found in reading. Can it be that simple? It was books, he said, that made him a better man.

The success story that is Ireland was not written for us, it’s a story we wrote for ourselves.

Great friendships explain why we hold on to this life so tightly because it disappears so quickly.

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

Abandonment is probably the root of paranoia.

Live your love is the right answer. I hold to that line attributed to Francis of Assisi, who told his followers, “Go into the world to preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words.” We need less to be told how to live our lives and more to see people living inspirational lives.

Our fans were often the same age as us, and we would prove to ourselves and them that we were the real punks. We were zealots of a kind with a determination not to surrender our values to the big cities, but rather bring them our true punk values like respect for the people who were paying to see us. We’d make it our business to stop and talk, to sign autographs. We wanted to fuse with our audience in the way no punk band had been able to. And as the singer, I had to create that fusion, to make a chemistry set of the crowd, by rubbishing the very idea they were a crowd. This was not just a nucleus of unstable atoms banging into each other; this was a gathering of sentient beings who for those few hours every night played the most important role in the drama, transporting the band and therefore themselves to some place neither had been before. Finding some moment that none of us had occupied before, or would ever again.

don’t scare you, they are not big enough.

El éxito debería llegar con una advertencia para la salud: para el adicto al trabajo y para quienes lo rodean.

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.

Umm Kulthum,

girls are more interesting than boys, mentally, physically, spiritually.

The very idea that your private thoughts or feelings are worth sharing with anyone outside your family or friends is already a kind of arrogance. Arrogance is the exit and entry point to the humiliation that art requires.

To “treat others as you treat yourself” is a bit of a pothole on the road to financial or even cultural dominance.

I had with me a small battery-operated Sony system that I used to record thoughts and melodies, and I busied myself making a recording of the baby’s heartbeat, a low but significant rhythm being picked up by ultrasound. Maybe I’d write a song to the heartbeat one day. A creative thought designed to hold off my growing terror.