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.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Dreams
I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.Collection: Poetry
The basic function of popular music is to create an environment for courting, lovemaking, and doing the dishes. It's useful because it addresses the heart in the midst of all these activities, and it will always be useful in this very important way.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Women
At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It's a cliche, but it's underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.Collection: Chance
My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly through the 10,000 nights I spent alone.Collection: Alone
In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.Collection: Truth
Music is the emotional life of most people.Collection: Music
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.Collection: Poetry
I have a deep tribal sense. I grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people; they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.Collection: Family
Success is survival.Collection: Success
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.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Poetry
There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.
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.
The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.
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.
This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can... reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah.'
If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.
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.
I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.
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.
Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either.
A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
I never had huge amounts of money when I was young. I had huge amounts of fame, and I always had the sense of labor and recompense. I always said I don't want to work for pay, but I want to get paid for my song.
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.
My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca.
As we make our way toward the finish line that some of us have already crossed, I never thought I'd get a Grammy Award. In fact, I was always touched by the modesty of their interest.
The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.
I had girlfriends who really irritated me by their devotion to the Beatles. I didn't begrudge them their interest, and there were songs like 'Hey Jude' that I could appreciate. But they didn't seem to be essential to the kind of nourishment that I craved.
I never had the sense that there was an end: that there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot.
I can make a couple of good sandwiches: tuna salad and chopped egg salad. And Greek bean soup. I was a cook for my old Zen master for many years. So there were two or three dishes that he liked, you know. Teriyaki salmon, a few things.
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.
There are writers who are great visionaries, who can depict huge movements - things like that. They're the great writers. I'm just the other kind.
I've got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I'm very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I'm really starving.
Journalists, especially English journalists, were very cruel to me. They said I only knew three chords when I knew five!
I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.
I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don't write the songs anyhow. So if you're lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you're lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this.
I don't have any sense or urgency about any of my writing, actually. I don't think mankind will be damaged if I don't put out a new album or a new book.
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.
When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.
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.
There were times that I thought I was good looking.
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.
I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life.