Leonard Cohen famous quotes

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Rain #Thinking #Reality

You have money, fame, youth, beauty, talent. That's a good start... for feeling good.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Feel Good #Feelings #Youth

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

#Writing #Cutting #Shining

Growing old becomes clear to you at a certain point. I think it's after the age of 70 you realize - you begin to actually be convinced - you're growing older.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Thinking #Age #Growing

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
-- Leonard Cohen

#Kings #Fall #Secret

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...
-- Leonard Cohen

#Thinking #Energy #Saint

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

#Sleep #Insomnia #World

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

#Thinking About You #Thinking #Certain

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

#Life #Motivational #Inspiring

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

#Love #Children #Secret

Love is not a victory march
-- Leonard Cohen

#Life #Love Is #Victory

A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Flesh #Scar #Self Injury

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Dark #Journey #Mad

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Anxiety #Speak #Strategy

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?
-- Leonard Cohen

#Song #Hard Work #Writing

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Compassion #Judging #Justice

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

#Emotional #Masterpiece

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

#Laughing #Cry

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

#Tree #Arms #Lilac

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Voice #Done #Dignity

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Meaningful #Song #Baby

even damnation is poisoned with rainbows.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Rainbow #Damnation

I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios....
-- Leonard Cohen

#Running #Fall #Weather

Comic books, movies, radio programmes centered their entertainment around the fact of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Cavalry to Dachau. European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Baby #Children #War

Never make a decision when you need to pee.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Decision #Needs

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Drunk #Junk #Bottles

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

#Friendship #Forgiving #Care

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Mother #Deprivation

Do not be a magician - be magic!
-- Leonard Cohen

#Magic #Ethics #Moral

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

#Real #Kissing #Live Your Life

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
-- Leonard Cohen

#Manhattan #Berlin #Firsts

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

#Hands #Sky #Surrender

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

#Blessing #Solitude #Family And Friends

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

#Drunk #Bird #Wire

Every heart to Love will come, but like a refugee
-- Leonard Cohen

#Heart #Refugee

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Real #Names #Perfect

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

#Bird #Break #Heard

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Heart #Men #Monsters

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Dream #Land #People

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

#Fun #Guitar #Play

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Depression #Psychics #Way

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Pain #Unique #Men

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

#Writing #Want #Pay

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

#Winning #Years #Voice

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Real #Two #Fake

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Political #Elements #Pieces

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

#Writing #Poetry #Burning

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Hate #Wish #Ends

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

#Wise #Men #Chaos

In the broken places, the light shines through.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Light #Broken #Shining

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

#Prayer #Children #Men

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Heart #Broken #Perfection

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

#Inspiring #Ocean #Chaos

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

#Running #Shows

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

#Disappear #Made

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.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Writing #People #Obscure

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

#Yesterday

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

#Men #Night #Laughing

I have tried in my way to be free.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Way #My Way

We are ugly but we have the music.
-- Leonard Cohen

#Ugly