Quotes by 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.”

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

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

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

“Well Ive seen your flag on the marble arch and love is not a victory march, its a cold and its a broken hallelujah”

“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.”

“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 armor themselves against wonder.”

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

“The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and its overturned the order of the soul...”

“I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. Thats what sitting on your ass does to your face.”

“In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.”

“What is most original in a mans nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldnt have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.”

“Act the way youd like to be and soon youll be the way you act.”

“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”

“I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm, your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy, golden storm, yes many loved before us, I know we are not new, in city and in forest they smiled like me and you, but now its come to distances and both of us must try, your eyes are soft with sorrow, Hey, thats no way to say goodbye.”

“All the Men will be sailors then, untill the sea shall free them.”

And Ill dance with you in Vienna,Ill be wearing a rivers disguise.The hyacinth wild on my shouldermy mouth on the dew of your thighs.And Ill bury my soul in a scrapbook,with the photographs there and the moss.And Ill yield to the flood of your beauty,my cheap violin and my cross.

... i didnt fall in love of courseits never up to youbut she was walking back and forthand i was passing through

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

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was areal mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was butone mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed andchanged into itself over and over.