Leonard Cohen Quotations

There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.

I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often.

I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.

Music is the emotional life of most people.

In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.

This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can't live without love. That life has very little meaning without love.

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.

Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.

We're always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who've closed down. And there are times in one's life when one has to close down just to regroup.

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

I don't really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I'd like to come back as my daughter's dog.

We're in a world where there's famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons so it's very hard for me to place any high value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard but compared to what?

I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.

Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.

I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.

Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity.

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.

When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.

Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.

And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.

I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.

We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it.

I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.

Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.

When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That's about all you can do.

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.

I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life.

I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.

Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.

My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.

As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.

The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.

Women stand for the objective world for a man. They stand for the thing that you're not and that's what you always reach for in a song.

Journalists, especially English journalists, were very cruel to me. They said I only knew three chords when I knew five!

And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart.

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca.

To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.

I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words.

I taught him how to dress. He taught me how to live forever.

Well I've seen your flag on the marble arch and love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.

In the broken places, the light shines through.

All the Men will be sailors then, untill the sea shall free them.

You live your life as if it's real.......a thousand kisses deep

The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.

We are not mad. We are human.We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.

A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love...

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love

It's the notion that there is no perfection - that there is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still there is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances.

I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.

He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

Now I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you? It goes like this the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah

I am not the one who loved, it's love that chooses me. When hatred with it's package comes, you forbid delivery.

Do not be a magician - be magic!

You have to keep cracking yourself open or you become a parody of yourself.

A poem has a certain - a different time. For instance, a poem is a very private experience, and it doesn't have a driving tempo. In other words, you know, you can go back and forward; you can comeback; you can linger. You know, it's a completely different time reference.

No penance serves to renew them, no massive transfusions of trust. Why not even revenge can undo them, so twisted these vows and so crushed.

Don't dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be.

The birds they sangat the break of day.Start again!!I heard them say

People used to say my music was too difficult or too obscure, and I never set out to be difficult or obscure. I just set out to write what I felt as honestly as I could, and I am delighted when other people feel a part of themselves in the music.

There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.

I know that there is an eye that watches all of us. There is a judgment that weighs everything we do. And before this great force, which is greater than any government, I stand in awe and I kneel in respect. And it is to this great judgment that I dedicate this next song.

A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

Love is not a victory march

You go your way I'll go your way too

How bitter were the Prozac pills of the last few hundred mornings

I don't remember lighting this cigarette and I don't remember if I'm here alone or waiting for someone.

I have tried in my way to be free.

We are ugly but we have the music.

Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free!!

If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.

How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?

What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.

You lose your grip, and then you slip into the Masterpiece.

My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.

It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender

Follow me, the wise man said, but he walked behind.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.

I fought against the bottle, but I had to do it drunk. Took my diamond to the pawn shop, but that don't make it junk.

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

It's time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.

even damnation is poisoned with rainbows.

Here's to the few who forgive what you do, and the fewer who don't even care

Never make a decision when you need to pee.

We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.

May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude.

Every heart to Love will come, but like a refugee

Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win 'Vocalist of the Year'.

Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation - none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy.