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Quotes by Leonard Cohen

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
– Leonard Cohen
Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.
– 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
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
In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.
– 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
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
– 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
There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
– 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
He lay beside her, an insomniac with visions of vastness. He thought of desert stretches so huge no Chosen People could cross them. He counted grains of sand like sheep and knew his job would last forever. He thought of aeroplane views of wheatlands so high he couldn't see which way the wind was bending the stalks. Arctic territories and sled-track distances.Miles he would never cover because he could never abandon this bed.
– Leonard Cohen
[The ages of] seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.
– 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
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
Success is survival.
– Leonard Cohen
Music is the emotional life of most people.
– 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
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 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
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