Leonard Norman Cohen CC GOQ was a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist. His work explored religion, politics, isolation, depression, sexuality, loss, death, and romantic relationships. Cohen was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2011, Cohen received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize. This Leonard Cohen quotes will motivate you.
Best Leonard Cohen Quotes
- “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “Never make a decision when you need to pee.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“Act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you act.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “In the broken places, the light shines through.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “When we are touched by a song, it is because the artist cannot hide himself.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “Follow me, the wise man said, but he walked behind.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“Do not be a magician – be magic!” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “The less I was of who I was, the better I felt.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “You have to keep cracking yourself open or you become a parody of yourself.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“Everybody knows the dice are loaded.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “You lose your grip, and then you slip into the Masterpiece.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “I want to be paid for my work, not work for my pay.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “You who wish to conquer pain, you must learn what makes one kind.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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?” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “I’ve seen the nations rise and fall. I’ve heard their stories, heard them all, but love’s the only engine of survival.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free!!” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “I don’t know which side is anybody on anymore. 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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“Love is the only engine of survival” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“You live your life as if it’s real…….a thousand kisses deep” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn’t write
What the night pencilled in.” ~ Leonard Cohen - “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 .” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “Your heart opens and of course you’re completely panicked because you’re used to guarding this organ with your life.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “The troubles came and I saved what I could save. A thread of light, a particle, a wave.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“It doesn’t matter what you do because it’s going to happen anyway.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “Fare thee well my nightingale, I lived but to be near you. Thow you are singing somewhere still I can no longer hear you.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico Garcia Lorca.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
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“A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “My reputation as a ladies’ man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “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.” ~ Leonard Cohen
- “The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it’s overturned the order of the soul.” ~ Leonard Cohen
