Leonard Cohen Quotes

I have to finish it in order to know whether it deserves to survive.

I think there's an appetite for seriousness. Seriousness is voluptuous, and very few people have allowed themselves the luxury of it.

You were Marlon Brando, I was Steve McQueen, you were K.Y. Jelly, I was Vaseline.

I have tried in my way to be free.

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

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

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'd written a lot of songs with hummingbirds in them. None of them ever came to anything, but I did write a few lines last month. It went like this: 'Listen to the hummingbird whose wings you cannot see. Listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me'.

Everybody knows the dice are loaded.

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.

Most of our distractions are designed to invite us away from this recognition, which is a good idea.

It's coming to America first, The cradle of the best and of the worst. It's here they got the range And the machinery for change And it's here they got the spiritual thirst. It's here the family's broken And it's here the lonely say That the heart has got to open In a fundamental way: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. O mighty Ship of State! To the Shores of Need Past the Reefs of Greed Through the Squalls of Hate Sail on, sail on.

Although only one man may be receiving the favors of a woman, all men in her presence are warmed.

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

Some people are graced with a flow; some people are graced with something less than a flow. I'm one of those.

Games are nature's most beautiful creation

The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.

Your heart opens and of course you're completely panicked because you're used to guarding this organ with your life.

We've got to temper anything we say with that. On the other hand, you've got to be serious about what you do. And you've got to understand the price you pay for frivolity or just for greed - it's a very high price, especially if you're involved in this sacred material, which is about the human heart and human desire and human tragedy.

We are ugly but we have the music.

It's been a long time since I've stood on a stage in London. Was about 14 or 15 years ago, I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream. Since then I've taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Ritalin, Focalin. I've also studied deeply in the philosophies and the religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.

We are awakening from the dream of isolation, from the dream of loneliness, and it's a terrible shock.

A man never got a woman back... not by begging on his knees.

I don't think there's any difference between a crush and profound love. I think the experience is that you dissolve your sentries and your battalions for a moment and you really do see that there is this unfixed free-flowing energy of emotion and thought between people, that it really is there.

We actually lead very violent, passionate lives and I think that we're hungry for insights into this condition. That's why we get all that stuff on television. It's really where we are, really what we are.

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

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

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.

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

The winter has not killed usagain!

A song, you know, you've got a tempo. You know,you've got something that is moving swiftly. You can't stop it, you know? Andit's designed to move swiftly from, you know, mouth to mouth, heart to heart,where a poem really speaks to something that has no time and that is - it's acompletely different perception.

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

Pay attention to the cracks, because that's where the light gets in.

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.

What a beautiful testament to the creative spirit and its true motives, to creative contribution coming from a place of purpose rather than a hunger for profit.

I don't have any spiritual strategy.

When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned.

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 looked into [Prozac]. I must say that it is certainly a wonder drug.

In My Secret Life" "I saw you this morning, you were moving so fast. Can't seem to loosen my grip On the past. And I miss you so much, there's no one in sight. And we're still making love In my secret life. I smile when I am angry, I cheat and I lie, I do what I have to do to get by, In my secret life.

I think culture's always been violent, and it is something we find very entertaining. Not only does it reflect our social reality, but it also reflects our psychic reality.

Someone gave me wishes and I wished for an embrace.

I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I’m just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep.

In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “the winter has not killed us again!

What were the bodies like on the beach? Ugly and white and ruined by offices.

From bitter searching of the heart, quickened with passion and with pain we rise to play a greater part this is the faith from which we start.

I'm never sure why I do anything, to tell you the truth.

I know 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...