Leonard Cohen quotes

Born
September 21 , 1934, Westmount, Quebec, Canada.

Died
November 7, 2016.

Occupation
Songwriter, singer, poet.

Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian singer, songwriter, poet and novelist. Cohen was inducted into both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
– Leonard Cohen

I didn’t want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.
– Leonard Cohen

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

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

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

My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn’t pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.
– Leonard Cohen

And I had not much of a voice. I didn’t play that great guitar either.
– Leonard Cohen

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.
– Leonard Cohen

I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.
– Leonard Cohen

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

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
– Leonard Cohen

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

Music is the emotional life of most people.
– Leonard Cohen

In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.
– Leonard Cohen

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
– Leonard Cohen

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

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

As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn’t understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.
– 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

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

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

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

And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart.
– Leonard Cohen

I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
– Leonard Cohen

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

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

I don’t think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.
– 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

This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can’t live without love. That life has very little meaning without love.
– Leonard Cohen

Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity.
– Leonard Cohen

The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.
– Leonard Cohen

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it’s not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.
– Leonard Cohen

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It’s for others; it’s for others to use.
– Leonard Cohen

Women stand for the objective world for a man. They stand for the thing that you’re not and that’s what you always reach for in a song.
– Leonard Cohen

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.
– 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

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

Act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you act.
– Leonard Cohen

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.
– Leonard Cohen

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca.
– Leonard Cohen

Success is survival.
– Leonard Cohen

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