Leonard Cohen Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

Leonard Cohen Motivational Quotations:

• “In the broken places, the light shines through.”

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

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

•  “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.”

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

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

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

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

  

   

• “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.”

•  “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.”

•  “Never make a decision when you need to pee.”

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

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

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

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

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

•  “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.”

•  “Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore”

•  “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.”

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

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

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

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

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

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

•  “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 who wish to conquer pain, you must learn what makes one kind.”

•  “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.”

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

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

•  “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 older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.”

  

   

• “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.”

•  “The candles burned The moon went down The polished hill The milky town Transparent, weightless, luminous Uncovering the two of us On that fundamental ground Where love's unwilled, unleashed, unbound And half the perfect world is found.”

•  “A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.”

• “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”

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

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

•  “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'.”

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

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

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

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

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

•  “No one masters the heart.”

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

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

•  “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.”

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

•  “Everybody knows the dice are loaded.”

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

•  “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.”

•  “Some people are graced with a flow. Some people are graced with something less than a flow.”

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

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

•  “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?”

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

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

•  “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.”