Leonard Cohen Quotes - Page 10

I think culture's always been violent, and it is something we find very entertaining. Not only does it reflect our social reality, but it also reflects our psychic reality.

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.

It's time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.

Your body will never be familiar.

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.

Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time.

Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.

You've got a deadline. Well, I do, too: death.

I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.

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 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.

It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of peace.

And this is our time-keeper, with a passion for percussion

I smile when I'm angry , I cheat and I lie. I do what I have to do to get by. But I know what is wrong and I know what is right , and I'd die for the truth in my secret life .

Seriousness is not Calvinistic, it's not a renunciation, it's the very opposite of that.

I kind of limp along like so many of us do in these realms. Occasionally I've felt the grace of another presence in my life. But I can't develop any kind of spiritual structure on that.

All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

Who could have foretold the heart grows old from touching others

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

You have money, fame, youth, beauty, talent. That's a good start... for feeling good.

Raise a million filters and the rain will not be clean, until the longing for it be refined in deep confession.

His vision was just outstanding. If you think of him in the same way as Pele then you would come close.

I won't comment on what Bob Dylan said, but I will comment on his receiving the Nobel Prize, which to me is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.

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.