Leonard cohen quotes

I loved you for a long, long time I know this love is real It don't matter how it all went wrong That don't change the way I feel And I can't believe that time's Gonna heal this wound I'm speaking of There ain't no cure for love

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.

The big change is the proximity to death.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I see people allowing their lives to diminish, to become shallow, so they can't enjoy the deep wells of experience. Maybe it's always been this way, when the heart tends to shut down. If only the heart shut down and there were no repercussions, it would be O.K., but when the heart shuts down, the whole system goes into a kind of despair that is intolerable.

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

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.

Everybody knows the dice are loaded.

Fare thee well my nightingale, I lived but to be near you. Thow you are singing somewhere still I can no longer hear you.

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

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.

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

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

Dream after dream we all lie in each other's arms

No one masters the heart.

And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moths.

Nothing can stop you from thinking. The human mind is designed to think continually.

I don't trust my inner feelings, inner feelings come and go.

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

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

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

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.

Don't call yourself a secret unless you mean to keep it.

You who wish to conquer pain, you must learn what makes one kind.

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.

My page was too white My ink was too thin The day wouldn't write What the night pencilled in.

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

Now suzanne takes you hand And she leads you to the river She is wearing rags and feathers From salvation army counters And the sun pours down like honey On our lady of the harbour And she shows you where to look Among the garbage and the flowers There are heroes in the seaweed There are children in the morning They are leaning out for love And they will lean that way forever While suzanne holds the mirror And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you know that she will trust you For shes touched your perfect body with her mind.

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.

You say I took the name in vain I don't even know the name But if I did, well really, what's it to you? There's a blaze of light in every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah

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

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.

We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.

Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm a great musicologist, but I'm a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time; you know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five.

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.

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.

Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore

I don't know which side is anybody on any more. I don't really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we're on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order.

I can't run no more with that lawless crowd while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud. But they've summoned, they've summoned up a thundercloud and they're going to hear from me. Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.

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

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.

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

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

My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room. This system has just worked for me, even though I've had to sweat over every word. It's just my style.

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

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.

The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.

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

Someone gave me wishes and I wished for an embrace.

Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

When you've fallen on the highway / and you're lying in the rain, / and they ask you how you're doing / of course you'll say you can't complain.

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.

It doesn't matter what you do because it's going to happen anyway.

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

Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past, a past that happened somewhere else.

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

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.

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

When we are touched by a song, it is because the artist cannot hide himself.

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'.

Never make a decision when you need to pee.

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.

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.

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.

May everyone live, And may everyone die. Hello, my love, And my love, Goodbye.

I am not the one who loves - It's love that chooses me. When hatred with his package comes, you forbid delivery...

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

Every heart to Love will come, but like a refugee

I told the truth, I didn't come to fool you

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

The duty of lovers is to tarnish the Golden Rule

Love is the only engine of survival

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.

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.

I guess you go for nothing, if you really want to go that far.

Why don't you try to do without him, why don't you try to live alone? Do you really need his hands for your passion? Do you really need his heart for your throne? Do you need his labor for your baby? Do you need his beast for the bone? Do you need to hold a leash to be a lady? I know that you can make it, you can make it on your own.

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

A heavy burden lifted from my soul, I heard that love was out of my control.

Poetry is a verdict rather than an intention.

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

As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.

this is every musician's dream, to stand in front of an audience and not have to prove your credentials.

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 .

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

To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older.

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 couldn't feel so I learned to touch.

Well it's true, ever since I stopped eating meat I feel a lot better among animals, I feel I can be much more honest when I pat a dog.

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

I have tried in my way to be free.

I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work - just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege.

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 be a magician - be magic!

I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece.

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

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

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

Please make me empty, if I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I'm not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness.

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

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.

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.

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

In the broken places, the light shines through.

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

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

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

There's no concession to the fact that Dylan might be a more sophisticated singer than Whitney Houston, that he's probably the most sophisticated singer we've had in a generation. Nobody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan's a Picasso - that exuberance, range, and assimilation of the whole history of music.

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.