Quotes by Leonard Cohen

• Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
• A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
• 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.
• There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
• 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.
• The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.
• Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.
• In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.
• I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.
• I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.
• Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
• 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.
• Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.
• 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.
• Embrace the art of imperfection, for it's the cracks that let the light in.
• Embrace the cracks in life, for that's where the light gets in.
• Embrace the cracks in your soul, for that is how the light gets in.
• A nail every now and then could daunt both joy and genius in both purpose and bed; apply it mercifully!
• Life is a lot like art; if it isn’t messy, you didn’t do it right!