Leonard Cohen Quotes

I will not be held like a drunkard / under the cold tap of facts

I'm afraid to live any place but in expectation. I'm no life-risk.

Every heart to Love will come, but like a refugee

I think that really what our training, what our culture, our religious institutions, our educational and cultural institutions should be about is preparing the heart for that journey outside of the cage of the ribs.

And I'll dance with you in Vienna, I'll be wearing a river's disguise. The hyacinth wild on my shoulder my mouth on the dew of your thighs. And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moss. And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty, my cheap violin and my cross.

You go your way I'll go your way too

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.

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

Something I wrote quite a few years ago was, "The voices in my head, they don't care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through." It is a common mistake, to think you're going to go into some kind of spiritual practice and you're going to be relieved of the human burdens, from human crosses like thought, jealousy, despair - in fact, if anything, these feelings are amplified.

[Patrick Leonard] is such a magnificent composer. I don't think there is anybody working today with those kind of skills that could translate one of my tunes into that really beautiful chamber music.

My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terrors for one who remembers the name.

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.

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

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.

I think what we like about music - and what we like about art in general....is that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we're always all over the place. A good song, a good lyric is a movie: it will just focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality that all of us live in.

The duty of lovers is to tarnish the Golden Rule

You should go from place to place recovering the poems that have been written for you to which you can affix your signature. Don't discuss these matters with anyone. Retrieve. Retrieve. When the basket is full someone will appear to whom you can present it.

There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't.

Any of the decisions that I made, if one could actually locate a shape or form, were all within a wall, the landscape of music.

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

When you're younger, you do have that thing that you were talking about where the mouth goes dry. I mean you have reactions, and you do fall in love.

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

Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached.

The less I was of who I was, the better I felt.

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.

My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character.

He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren't going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire.

even damnation is poisoned with rainbows.

You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal.

Love is not a victory march

ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars

She was made of flesh and eyelashes.

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.

Well, I've been waiting, I was sure we'd meet between the trains we're waiting for I think it's time to board another Please understand, I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter

This particular school of Zen has always considered itself the Marines of the spiritual world, so it has a kind of bias against conceptual thinking in favor of a very rigorous physical life.

You can do anything you want to [ in ashram] if you can find the time. It's a very rigorous day. It starts at 2:30 in the morning and often doesn't end until midnight, so if you can actually find a moment to have a drink or a smoke, you're quite welcome to, as long as it doesn't interfere with your capacity to follow the schedule.

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

I swear by this song and by all that I have done wrong, I will make it all up to thee.

Seriousness is the deepest pleasure we have.

If you want a lover I'll do anything you ask me to. And if you want another kind of love I'll wear a mask for you.

Show me slowly what I only know the limits of Dance me to the end of love

At the very center of our culture is a crucified man, a tortured man hanging on a cross of wood. You have an image of violence at the very center of our spiritual investigation.

GIFT You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me

Anyone who's been a heavy drinker and heavy smoker and has the good future to survive that and give it up knows what a very different kind of daily existence one has. I was smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. And I was drinking heavily on tours.

Love is a fire/It burns everyone/It disfigures everyone/It is the world's excuse for being ugly.

His vision was just outstanding. If you think of him in the same way as Pele then you would come close.

It's not a cry you can hear at night. It's not somebody who has seen the light. It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.

Well, you know, there's depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn't just the blues. It's not just like I have a hangover in the weekend ... the girl didn't show up or something like that. It isn't that. It's not really depression, it's a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you're gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit.