George Harrison
English musician and member of the Beatles (1943–2001)
George Harrison (24 or 25 February 1943 – 29 November 2001) was a British songwriter, musician and film producer who rose to fame as a member of The Beatles.
While my guitar gently weeps.
Quotes
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- If you'd have asked me that question, 9 months ago, well, I would have been able to say, to come to America, to have a number one hit in America, and to play Carnegie Hall, to play the Palladium, to play in front of the Queen, and all that. ... The things we've done, they were our ambitions, say 9 months ago.
- Asked for his greatest ambition. Pop Chronicles, Show 28 - The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!: The U.S.A. is invaded by a wave of long-haired English rockers. Part 2, (1964, broadcast 1969).
- If there's a God, I want to see Him. It's pointless to believe in something without proof, and Krishna consciousness and meditation are methods where you can actually obtain God perception. In that way you can see, hear and play with God. Perhaps this may sound weird, but God is really there next to you.
- Introduction to 'Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead (1970) by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
- From the Hindu perspective, each soul is divine. All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn't matter what you call Him just as long as you call. Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusion. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture. One's values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture and that not in, but beyond, lies his own ultimate reality.
- Introduction to Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead (1970) by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada; this paraphrases some statements from An Autobiography of a Yogi (1948) by Paramahansa Yogananda
- My idea in "My Sweet Lord," because it sounded like a "pop song," was to sneak up on them a bit. The point was to have the people not offended by "Hallelujah," and by the time it gets to "Hare Krishna," they're already hooked, and their foot's tapping, and they're already singing along "Hallelujah," to kind of lull them into a sense of false security. And then suddenly it turns into "Hare Krishna," and they will all be singing that before they know what's happened, and they will think, "Hey, I thought I wasn't supposed to like Hare Krishna!"
- Interview with Mukunda Goswami (4 September 1982)
- I always felt at home with Krishna. You see it was already a part of me. I think it's something that's been with me from my previous birth .... I'd rather be one of the devotees of God than one of the straight, so-called sane or normal people who just don't understand that man is a spiritual being, that he has a soul.
- Interview, Henley-On-Thames, Oxfordshire, 1982, Cited in Sushama Londhe in “A Tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and Wisdom Spanning Continents and Time about India and Her Culture”
- It just annoyed me that people got so into the Beatles. "Beatles, Beatles, Beatles." It's not that I don't like talking about them. I've never stopped talking about them. It's "Beatles this, Beatles that, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles." Then in the end, it's like "Oh, sod off with the Beatles," you know?
- Interview with Selina Scott on West 57th Street (aired 12 December 1987)
- I had no ambition when I was a kid other than to play guitar and get in a rock 'n' roll band. I don't really like to be the guy in the white suit at the front. Like in the Beatles, I was the one who kept quiet at the back and let the other egos be at the front.
- Interview with Selina Scott on West 57th Street (aired 12 December 1987)
- He was annoyed 'cause I didn't say that he'd written one line of this song "Taxman." But I also didn't say how I wrote two lines of "Come Together" or three lines of "Eleanor Rigby," you know? I wasn't getting into any of that. I think, in the balance, I would have had more things to be niggled with him about than he would have had with me!
- When asked about John Lennon's feelings towards his autobiography, interview with Selina Scott on West 57th Street, aired 12 December 1987
- Rap music is just computerised crap. I listen to Top of the Pops and after three songs I feel like killing someone.
- Quoted in The Beatles — After the Break-up : In Their Own Words (1991) by David Bennahum, p. 54
- I felt in love, not with anything or anybody in particular but with everything.
- of first taking LSD, The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 177
- If everybody who had a gun just shot themselves there wouldn’t be a problem.
- The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 226
- You can be standing right in front of the truth and not necessarily see it, and people only get it when they’re ready to get it.
- The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 267
- That's what the whole Sixties Flower-Power thing was about: "Go away, you bunch of boring people."
- The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 296
- I'd thought it would be something like King's Road [London], only more. Somehow I expected them all to own their own little shops. I expected them to all be nice and clean and friendly and happy … (on the contrary, I discovered them to be) hideous, spotty little teenagers.
- Expressing disenchantment with the "Summer of Love" hippies of San Francisco's famous “hippie haven” i.e., the Haight-Ashbury district, which he visited on 7 August 1967, as quoted in Dark Horse: The Life and Art of George Harrison, Geoffrey Giuliano, Da Capo Press, ISBN 0306807475 ISBN 9780306807473, p. 80. [1]
- I don't mind anybody dropping out of anything, but it's the imposition on somebody else I don't like. The moment you start dropping out and then begging off somebody else to help you, then it's no good. It doesn't matter what you are as long as you work. It doesn't matter if you chop wood as long as you chop and keep chopping. Then you get what's coming to you. You don't have to drop out. In fact, if you drop out you put yourself further away from the goal of life than if you were to keep working.
- Quoted in Dark Horse: The Life and Art of George Harrison, Geoffrey Giuliano, Da Capo Press, ISBN 0306807475 ISBN 9780306807473, p. 80. [2]
- I got tired of people saying "But what can I do?" Also, the reluctance of the press to report the full details created the need to bring attention to it. So the song "Bangla Desh" was written specifically to get attention to the war prior to the concert.
- – George Harrison, 1979, George Harrison, I Me Mine, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA, 2002; ISBN 0-8118-3793-9).
- Even now I still meet waiters in Bengali restaurants who say, "When we were in the jungle fighting, it was great to know somebody out there was thinking of us."
- – George Harrison, 1991 in Elliot J. Huntley, Mystical One: George Harrison – After the Break-up of the Beatles, Guernica Editions (Toronto, ON, 2006; ISBN 1-55071-197-0).
- The money we raised was secondary. The main thing was, we spread the word and helped get the war ended ... What we did show was that musicians and people are more humane than politicians.
- – George Harrison, 1992 in Joshua M. Greene, Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison, John Wiley & Sons (Hoboken, NJ, 2006; ISBN 978-0-470-12780-3).
Lyrics
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Now won't you lend your hand, try to understand?
Relieve the people of Bangladesh.
- Try to realize it's all within yourself,
No one else can make you change.
And to see you're really only very small
And life flows in within you and without you.
- Without going out of your door,
You can know all things on earth.
Without looking out of your window you could know the ways of heaven.
The farther one travels. the less one knows, the less one really knows.- The Inner Light (song) (1968), On Transcendental Meditation and teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
- If you're listening to this song
You may think the chords are going wrong
But they're not
We just wrote it like that- Only a Northern Song (1967)
- ...the more I learn the less I know...
- "It's All Too Much" (1967)
- Do what you want to do,
And go where you're going to.
Think for yourself
'Cause I won't be there with you.- Think for Yourself (1965)
- I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps.- While My Guitar Gently Weeps (1968)
- I don't know why nobody told you how to unfold your love
I don't know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you.- While My Guitar Gently Weeps (1968)
- I look at the world and I notice it’s turning.
While my guitar gently weeps.
With every mistake we must surely be learning,
Still my guitar gently weeps.- While My Guitar Gently Weeps (1968)
- I don't know how you were diverted
You were perverted too.
I don't know how you were inverted
No one alerted you.- While My Guitar Gently Weeps (1968)
- Little darling,
It's been a long cold lonely winter.
Little darling,
It feels like years since it's been here.
Here comes the sun...- Here Comes the Sun (1969)
- Little darling
I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling
It seems like years since it's been clear
Here comes the sun...- Here Comes the Sun (1969)
- Something in the way she moves
attracts me like no other lover.- Something (1969)
- If I grow up I'll be a singer, wearing rings on every finger
Not worrying what they or you say,
I'll live and love and maybe someday
Who knows baby
you may comfort me.- Old Brown Shoe (1969)
- I really want to see you,
Really want to be with you,
Really want to see you lord,
But it takes so long, my lord.- My Sweet Lord (1970)
- My sweet Lord (Hallelujah)
Hm, my Lord (Hallelujah)
My, my, my Lord (Hallelujah)
I really want to know you (Hallelujah)
Really want to go with you (Hallelujah)
Really want to show you Lord (ahh)
That it won't take long, my Lord (Hallelujah)
Hmm (Hallelujah)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah)
My, my, Lord (Hallelujah)
Hm, my Lord (Hare Krishna)
My, my, my Lord (Hare Krishna)- My Sweet Lord (1970)
- Bangladesh, Bangladesh
Where so many people are dying fast
And it sure looks like a mess
I've never seen such distress.
Now won't you lend your hand, try to understand?
Relieve the people of Bangladesh.- Bangla Desh (1971); released as a single, and then on The Concert for Bangladesh (1971), and later on the album Living in the Material World (1973)
