Top 100 Leonard Cohen Quotes
#1. I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me, but the room just filled up with mosquitoes.
Leonard Cohen
#2. He knew that hair couldn't feel; he kissed her hair.
Leonard Cohen
#3. Maybe there's a god above but the only thing I learned from love was how to shoot at somebody who outdrew you.
Leonard Cohen
#4. Hallelujah"
"Your faith was strong but you needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof.
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to a kitchen chair,
she broke your throne, and she cut your hair.
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah ...
Leonard Cohen
#5. One is distracted by this notion that there is such an thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff to come up with my payload
Leonard Cohen
#6. We do what only lovers can: make a gift out of necessity.
Leonard Cohen
#8. 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
Leonard Cohen
#9. The first star tonight insanely high, virgin, calm.
I have one hour of peace before the documented planets burn me down.
Leonard Cohen
#10. I'm neither left or right. I'm just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
Leonard Cohen
#11. Your faith was strong, but you needed proof...
Leonard Cohen
#12. How quickly pettiness returns, and that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh, the wife's cunt.
Leonard Cohen
#13. Sexuality is general, and although only one man may be receiving the favors of a woman, all men in her presence are warm. That's the great generosity of women and the great generosity of the creator who worked it out that way, that there are no unilateral agreements of sexuality.
Leonard Cohen
#14. If you want a lover I'll do anything you ask.
If you want a different kind of love I'll wear a mask.
If you want to strike me down in anger here I stand.
If you want a partner in life take my hand.
I'm your man.
Leonard Cohen
#15. Dream after dream we all lie in each other's arms
Leonard Cohen
#16. I'm blackening pages, but I don't know if it's writing.
Leonard Cohen
#18. 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
#19. Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.
Leonard Cohen
#20. His knowledge of ancient Greece was based entirely on a poem Edgar Allan Poe, a few homosexual encounters with restaurateurs (he ate free at almost every soda fountain in the city), and a plaster reproduction of the Akropolis which, for some reason, he had coated with red nail polish.
Leonard Cohen
#21. I fought against the bottle, but I had to do it drunk. Took my diamond to the pawn shop, but that don't make it junk.
Leonard Cohen
#22. Now Suzanne takes your 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
Leonard Cohen
#23. I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.
Leonard Cohen
#24. You have to keep cracking yourself open or you become a parody of yourself.
Leonard Cohen
#25. Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time
Leonard Cohen
#26. The most precious secret has been leaked:
There is no Opposition!
Leonard Cohen
#27. The silver knives are flashing in that tired old cafe ...
Leonard Cohen
#28. ...And everything depends upon how near you sleep to me.
Leonard Cohen
#29. All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them
Leonard Cohen
#30. I want history to jump on Canada's spine with sharp skates.
Leonard Cohen
#31. Then I start to struggle
With a feeble song
Which will overcome me
Many miles from home
Leonard Cohen
#32. Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
Leonard Cohen
#33. You don't know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I'm the little jew who wrote the Bible.
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
#34. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#35. I don't ask for information that I probably wouldn't be able to process even if it were granted to me.
--Aug 2016 interview, when asked what might be in store for us after the big sunset
Leonard Cohen
#36. 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
#38. When he puts his mouth against her shoulder
she is uncertain whether her shoulder
has given or received the kiss.
All her flesh is like a mouth.
Leonard Cohen
#39. BREAVMAN KNOWS a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.
Leonard Cohen
#40. This was your heart
This swarm of flies
This was once your mouth
This bowl of lies
You serve them well
I'm not surprised
You're of their kin
You're of their kind
Leonard Cohen
#41. Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached.
Leonard Cohen
#42. I've always held the song in high regard because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events.
Leonard Cohen
#43. Coroner's inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn't been to the sea-shore in ten years.
Leonard Cohen
#45. Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
#46. The wretched beast is tame I don't need a lover So blow out the flame...
Leonard Cohen
#47. I've forgotten most of what I've read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world.
Leonard Cohen
#48. Yeah I missed you since the place got wrecked
By the winds of change and the weeds of sex
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's closing time.
Leonard Cohen
#49. Like a bird on a wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir,
I have tried in my way to be free!!
Leonard Cohen
#50. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#51. Ou wanted to be the Superman who was never Clark Kent
Leonard Cohen
#52. The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.
Leonard Cohen
#53. The Remote
I often think about you
when I'm lying alone in
my room with my mouth
open and the remote
lost somewhere in the bed.
Leonard Cohen
#55. When we are touched by a song, it is because the artist cannot hide himself.
Leonard Cohen
#56. I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.
Leonard Cohen
#57. A rat is more alive than a turtle.
A turtle is slow, cold, mechanical, nearly a toy, a shell with legs. Their deaths didn't count. But a white rat is quick and warm in its envelope of skin
Leonard Cohen
#59. A sip of wine, a cigarette, And then it's time to go. I tidied up the kitchenette; I tuned the old banjo. I'm wanted at the traffic-jam. They're saving me a seat.
Leonard Cohen
#60. I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against.
Leonard Cohen
#61. It's time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.
Leonard Cohen
#62. I listen to the radio and I like all kinds of music, you know, but I like to hear from people who have been there. Hank Williams has been there.
Leonard Cohen
#63. 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
Leonard Cohen
#64. We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they're paid for it.
Leonard Cohen
#66. When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.
Leonard Cohen
#67. To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.
Leonard Cohen
#68. And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either.
Leonard Cohen
#69. I want to be paid for my work, not work for my pay.
Leonard Cohen
#70. [S]ongs must be measured by their utility. Any jaunty little tune that can get you from one point to another as you drive, or get you through the dishes, or that can illuminate or dignify your courting, I always appreciate.
-interview, 1995
Leonard Cohen
#71. Love me this first day of June.
I'd rather sleep with ashes than priestly wisdom.
Of all the lonely places in the world this is best where debris is human.
I kiss the precious ashes that fall from fiery flesh.
On these familiar shapes I lay my kisses down.
Leonard Cohen
#72. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#73. One eye filled with blueprints
one eye filled with night
Leonard Cohen
#74. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#76. Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else.
Then let's be quiet together.
Leonard Cohen
#77. And summoned now
to deal with your invincible defeat
You live your life
As if it's real
Leonard Cohen
#78. Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
Leonard Cohen
#79. A poem has a certain - a different time. For instance, a poem is a very private experience, and it doesn't have a driving tempo. In other words, you know, you can go back and forward; you can comeback; you can linger. You know, it's a completely different time reference.
Leonard Cohen
#80. At first first nothing will happen to us
and later on
it will happen to us again.
Leonard Cohen
#81. 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!
Leonard Cohen
#82. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#83. There is a religious hallelujah, but there are many other ones[ ... ] When one looks at the world, there's only one thing to say, and it's hallelujah. That's the way it is.
Leonard Cohen
#84. I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.
Leonard Cohen
#85. 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.
Leonard Cohen
#86. Everybody knows that the dice are loaded,
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed,
Everybody knows that the war is over,
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Leonard Cohen
#87. When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
Leonard Cohen
#88. So I must say it quickly;
Whoever is in your life,
those that harm you,
those that help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know --
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
Recognize the hook.
You are listening to radio resistance.
Leonard Cohen
#90. I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.
Leonard Cohen
#91. All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.
Leonard Cohen
#92. And here you are hurried, And here you are gone; And here is the love, That it's all built upon.
Leonard Cohen
#93. The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.
Leonard Cohen
#94. If only my genitals didn't float
When I relaxed in the bath
And we both looked down and we both agreed
It's stupid to be a man
Leonard Cohen
#95. Blessed are you who circled desire with a blade, and the garden with fiery swords, and heaven and earth with a word.
Leonard Cohen
#96. Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.
Leonard Cohen
#98. I didn't kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn't turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn't sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me
Leonard Cohen
#99. And clenching your fist for the ones like us Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty.
Leonard Cohen
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
