Leonard Cohen Quotes

"You have loved enough, now let me be the lover." You could say that God is speaking to you or the cosmos, or your lover. It just means, like, Forget it. Lean back and be loved by all that is already loving you. It is your effort at love that is preventing you from experiencing it. It is like if you ever taught kids how to swim. The most difficult thing is Goddam to understand that they will float, if they relax, if they hold their breath and relax, they will actually float. For most kids it is difficult to swim. They feel they are going to sink like a stone to the bottom of the lake.

Everything has a crack in it; that's how the light gets in.

Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time

In our rags of light, all dressed to kill.

Everybody knows that you love me baby Everybody knows that you really do Everybody knows that you've been faithful Ah give or take a night or two Everybody knows you've been discreet But there were so many people you just had to meet without your clothes And everybody knows

Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.

The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.

No sospeché la insignificancia de mi sueño. Creí haber concebido el sueño más vasto de mi generación: quse ser mago. Ésa era mi idea de la gloria. He aquí una súplica basada en toda mi experiencia: no seas mago, sé mágico.

Please understand, I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter. When he talks like this you don't know what he's after.

If only my genitals didn't float
When I relaxed in the bath
And we both looked down and we both agreed
It's stupid to be a man

It's like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.

Maybe there's a God above,
As for me, all I've ever seemed to learn from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
Yeah but it's not a complaint that you hear tonight,
It's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light
No it's a cold and it's a very lonely Hallelujah.

My friends are gone and my hair is grey.
I ache in places I used to play.
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on.
I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.

All busy in the sunlight The flecks did float and dance, And I was tumbled up with them In formless circumstance.

And Jesus was a sailor When he walked upon the water And he spent a long time watching From his lonely wooden tower And when he knew for certain Only drowning men could see him He said "All men will be sailors then Until the sea shall free them" But he himself was broken Long before the sky would open Forsaken, almost human He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone