Top 250 Leonard Cohen Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It’s a mysterious process.”

— Leonard Cohen

202. “Well I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one.”

— Leonard Cohen

203. “Someone gave me wishes and I wished for an embrace.”

— Leonard Cohen

204. “I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.”

— Leonard Cohen

205. “I have nothing against the Queen of England. Even in my heart I never resented her for not being Jackie Kennedy. She is, to my mind, a very gallant lady, victimized by whoever it is who designs the tops of her uniforms.”

— Leonard Cohen

206. “I listen to the radio and I like all kinds of music, you know, but I like to hear from people who have been there. Hank Williams has been there.”

— Leonard Cohen

207. “What I loved in my old life – I haven’t forgotten – it lives in my spine.”

— Leonard Cohen

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

— Leonard Cohen

209. “A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love.”

— Leonard Cohen

210. “We do what only lovers can: make a gift out of necessity.”

— Leonard Cohen

211. “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

212. “Dear Hitler Take away the torches I’m not guilty I had to have this.”

— Leonard Cohen

213. “In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “the winter has not killed us again!”

— Leonard Cohen

214. “It’s a depressing habit you have of loving to sneeze and of eating apples as if they were juicier for you and being the first one to exclaim how good the movie is. You depress people. We like apples too.”

— Leonard Cohen

215. “I am this thing that needs to sing.”

— Leonard Cohen

216. “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

217. “G-d is alive. Magic is afoot. G-d is afoot. Magic is alive.”

— Leonard Cohen

218. “Your body will never be familiar.”

— Leonard Cohen

219. “As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn’t understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.”

— Leonard Cohen

220. “Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing.”

— Leonard Cohen

221. “It’s true that all the men you knew were dealers who said they were through with dealing Every time you gave them shelter. I know that kind of man It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.”

— Leonard Cohen

222. “And this is our time-keeper, with a passion for percussion.”

— Leonard Cohen

223. “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

224. “When we are touched by a song, it is because the artist cannot hide himself.”

— Leonard Cohen

225. “My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Fernando Garcia Lorca.”

— Leonard Cohen

226. “No penance serves to renew them, no massive transfusions of trust. Why not even revenge can undo them, so twisted these vows and so crushed.”

— Leonard Cohen

227. “One is distracted by this notion that there is such an thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff to come up with my payload.”

— Leonard Cohen

228. “My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character.”

— Leonard Cohen

229. “People used to say my music was too difficult or too obscure, and I never set out to be difficult or obscure. I just set out to write what I felt as honestly as I could, and I am delighted when other people feel a part of themselves in the music.”

— Leonard Cohen

230. “Now, I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m a great musicologist, but I’m a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time; you know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five.”

— Leonard Cohen

231. “I’ve always held the song in high regard because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events.”

— Leonard Cohen

232. “He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren’t going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire.”

— Leonard Cohen

233. “I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I’m up against.”

— Leonard Cohen

234. “No soy un santo ni un asesino; no amo ni mato. Hago el amor y arranco las alas de las moscas.”

— Leonard Cohen

235. “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.”

— Leonard Cohen

236. “I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios...”

— Leonard Cohen

237. “My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn’t pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.”

— Leonard Cohen

238. “After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.”

— Leonard Cohen

239. “We did no train ourselves to receive, because we believed there wasn’t anything to receive and we could not endure with this belief.”

— Leonard Cohen

240. “Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique.”

— Leonard Cohen

241. “I didn’t want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.”

— Leonard Cohen

242. “Don’t write about ideas... write about convictions of the heart.”

— Leonard Cohen

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

— Leonard Cohen

244. “I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.”

— Leonard Cohen

245. “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

246. “I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words.”

— Leonard Cohen

247. “Poetry is a verdict rather than an intention.”

— Leonard Cohen

248. “Although only one man may be receiving the favors of a woman, all men in her presence are warmed.”

— Leonard Cohen

249. “And I had not much of a voice. I didn’t play that great guitar either.”

— Leonard Cohen

250. “I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it’s not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.”

— Leonard Cohen