Leonard Cohen Quotes

Maybe there's a God above, As for me, all I've ever seemed to learn from love Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. Yeah but it's not a complaint that you hear tonight, It's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light No it's a cold and it's a very lonely Hallelujah.

It is different [to perform in Israel] because it arises from very deep wells of affiliation.

No one's ever done one of my songs badly. People say to me, "God, so-and-so wrecked that song." Well, I'm unaware of it. Anybody doing one of my tunes has earned my gratitude, and I don't get that many covers where I have the luxury to choose.

Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.

Music is the emotional life of the most people.

The troubles came and I saved what I could save. A thread of light, a particle, a wave.

I want to be paid for my work, not work for my pay.

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

Everybody knows that you've been faithful, give or take a night or two.

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

Never make a decision when you need to pee.

... i didn't fall in love of course it's never up to you but she was walking back and forth and i was passing through

I hope we [with Patrick Leonard] can come up with something orchestral with some spoken material. And I also, God willing, hope that perhaps another record of songs also might emerge, but one never knows.

I’ve seen the nations rise and fall. I’ve heard their stories, heard them all, but love’s the only engine of survival.

The moon is swimming naked and the summer night is fragrant with a mighty expectation of relief.

My son and my daughter have both been an incredibly sustaining force, especially through this recent bad patch [of health]. So, I've been blessed and grateful for their company and for their assistance.

Maybe we, the cultural workers , could apply ourselves. We're not going to resolve it in this moment or even in this generation, but perhaps as some kind of agenda we could invite our writers and cultural workers to address the problem a little more responsibly, because people are suffering tremendously from a want of data.

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.

[I had a sense of interior panic].Always. I didn't really know what to call it for a long time, but I have a friend in Greece who used that word panic a lot, and I found myself resisting it, until I totally accepted that as a precise description of my interior condition. It was mostly panic from one moment to the next. And nothing much else was going on.

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

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.

Do not believe the truth. The truth is tiny compared to what you have to do.

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

Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don't know what to say.

I have often prayed for you like this Let me have her

I've never thought of myself as a singer anyway. . . I've been free from those considerations because so many people over the years told me I don't have a voice. I kind of bought that. I never thought that much about it to begin with. I knew I didn't have one of the great voices. As my Damon Runyanesque lawyer used to say, "none of you guys can sing. If I want to hear singing, I'll go to the Metropolitan Opera."

We all need that experience of forgetting who you are. Forgetting who you are is such a delicious experience and so frightening that we're in this conflicted predicament.

I noticed that when I was on Prozac my relationship with the landscape improved. I actually stopped thinking about myself for a minute or two, because most of the thoughts one has about oneself are involved with desire or loneliness or isolation or strategies to overcome them.

First of all nothing will happen and a little later nothing will happen again.

There's always a nice tune [on radio] - helps you get the dishes done . I like to get the news from time to time - not too often. I don't feel deprived.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking. Everybody knows the captain lied. Everybody got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died. Everybody talking to their pockets. Everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long-stem rose. Everybody knows.

And clenching your fist for the ones like us Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty.

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 heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him. If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside our door.

I couldn't feel so I learned to touch.

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

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

There's a deep tribal aspect to my own nature. So when I'm in contact with those deep resources, of course I feel a very special kind of nourishment.

I would say the hummingbird really deserves the royalties on [some of my songs].

I don't have a television set up [in the mountains], of course, but I find I don't miss it at all, or the newspaper. I've sneaked a radio into by cabin, but I find I turn it on very rarely.

It’s a depressing habit you have of loving to sneeze and of eating apples as if they were juicier for you and being the first one to exclaim how good the movie is. You depress people. We like apples too.

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

A sip of wine, a cigarette, And then it’s time to go. I tidied up the kitchenette; I tuned the old banjo. I’m wanted at the traffic-jam. They’re saving me a seat.

Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you’re tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty .

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

I've always held the song in high regard because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events.

My friends are gone and my hair is grey. I ache in places I used to play. And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on. I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.

Your body will never be familiar.