Top 250 Leonard Cohen Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Do not believe the truth. The truth is tiny compared to what you have to do.”

— Leonard Cohen

152. “Blessed is your name. Blessed is the confession of your name.”

— Leonard Cohen

153. “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

154. “Bind me to your will, bind me with these threads of sorrow, and gather me out of the afternoon where I have torn my soul on twenty monstrous altars, offering all things but myself.”

— Leonard Cohen

155. “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

156. “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.”

— Leonard Cohen

157. “My page was too white My ink was too thin The day wouldn’t write What the night pencilled in.”

— Leonard Cohen

158. “Everytime you grab at love you will lose a snowflake of your memory.”

— Leonard Cohen

159. “It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.”

— Leonard Cohen

160. “History is a needle for putting men asleep anointed with the poison Of all they want to keep.”

— Leonard Cohen

161. “I dreamed about you baby. It was just the other night. Most of you was naked Ah, but some of you was light.”

— Leonard Cohen

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

— Leonard Cohen

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

— Leonard Cohen

164. “I finally broke into the prison I found my place in the chain Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows.”

— Leonard Cohen

165. “How bitter were the Prozac pills of the last few hundred mornings.”

— Leonard Cohen

166. “I couldn’t feel so I learned to touch.”

— Leonard Cohen

167. “At first first nothing will happen to us and later on it will happen to us again.”

— Leonard Cohen

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

— Leonard Cohen

169. “Even without the mushroom cloud still I would have hated Listen I would have done the same things even if there were no death I will not be held like a drunkard under the cold tap of facts I refuse the universal alibi.”

— Leonard Cohen

170. “The duty of lovers is to tarnish the Golden Rule.”

— Leonard Cohen

171. “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

172. “Coroner’s inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn’t been to the sea-shore in ten years.”

— Leonard Cohen

173. “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

174. “Who could have foretold the heart grows old from touching others.”

— Leonard Cohen

175. “Fare thee well my nightingale, I lived but to be near you. Thow you are singing somewhere still I can no longer hear you.”

— Leonard Cohen

176. “I guess you go for nothing, if you really want to go that far.”

— Leonard Cohen

177. “Shouldering your loneliness like a gun that you will not learn to aim, you stumble into this movie house then you climb, you climb into the frame.”

— Leonard Cohen

178. “She was made of flesh and eyelashes.”

— Leonard Cohen

179. “A teacher I once had told me that the older you get, the lonelier you become and the deeper the love you need. Loneliness creates an appetite for deeper love, and the entire predicament deepens. And as a result of suffering, your capacity to love deeply increases.”

— Leonard Cohen

180. “I want history to jump on Canada’s spine with sharp skates.”

— Leonard Cohen

181. “And clenching your fist for the ones like us Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty.”

— Leonard Cohen

182. “I have often prayed for you like this Let me have her.”

— Leonard Cohen

183. “The art of longing’s over, and it’s never coming back.”

— Leonard Cohen

184. “Well, I’ve been waiting, I was sure we’d meet between the trains we’re waiting for I think it’s time to board another Please understand, I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter.”

— Leonard Cohen

185. “So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed, It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed, It’s like our visit to the moon or to that other star, I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.”

— Leonard Cohen

186. “I remember what Ben Jonson said: ‘I’ve studied all the philosophies and all the theologies but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.”

— Leonard Cohen

187. “The winter has not killed usagain!”

— Leonard Cohen

188. “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

189. “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.”

— Leonard Cohen

190. “Stunned and still not suffering. Swollen with care and anxiety and still not suffering. Useless, old and full of grief, but still not suffering.”

— Leonard Cohen

191. “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

192. “He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.”

— Leonard Cohen

193. “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

194. “What were the bodies like on the beach? Ugly and white and ruined by offices.”

— Leonard Cohen

195. “I’m not a very nostalgic person. I don’t really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.”

— Leonard Cohen

196. “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap.”

— Leonard Cohen

197. “I swear by this song and by all that I have done wrong, I will make it all up to thee.”

— Leonard Cohen

198. “I bargain now. I offer buttons for his love.”

— Leonard Cohen

199. “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

200. “I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I’m glad you stood in my way.”

— Leonard Cohen