And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

This line closes “The End,” the final track on the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road (the last album they recorded, though not the last released). Credited to Lennon–McCartney and sung by Paul McCartney, it arrives after a climactic medley that many listeners hear as a summation of the band’s career and a farewell amid the group’s internal strains and impending breakup. As the song resolves, the lyric functions like a concluding moral: after the virtuoso instrumental exchanges and the album’s long arc, the final word is not fame or conflict but a simple reckoning about what one gives and receives in human relationships.

The sentence proposes a kind of emotional conservation law: the quality of love one experiences is proportionate to the love one generates. It can be read ethically (a call to generosity and responsibility in relationships) and spiritually (a karmic or golden-rule sentiment). Placed at the end of Abbey Road, it also works meta-textually as a valediction—suggesting that the Beatles’ legacy, and any life’s “end,” is measured less by achievement than by the capacity to give affection, care, and goodwill. Its plain diction and balanced structure (“take” / “make”) give it the feel of a proverb, helping explain its durability as a standalone quotation.