Love Leonard Cohen Quotes & Sayings

People change and their bodies change and their hair grows gray and falls out and their bodies decay and die ... but there is something that doesn't change about love and about the feelings we have for people. Marianne, the woman of So Long, Marianne, when I hear her voice on the telephone, I know something is completely intact even though our lives have separated and we've gone our very different paths. I feel that love never dies, and that when there is an emotion strong enough to gather a song around it, that there is something about that emotion that is indestructible ... — Leonard Cohen

May everyone live, And may everyone die. Hello, my love, And my love, Goodbye. — Leonard Cohen

We sold ourselves for love but now we are free
I'm so sorry for that ghost I made you be
Only one of us was real and that was me — Leonard Cohen

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

I didn't fall in love of course it's never up to you but she was walking back and forth and i was passing through — Leonard Cohen

String Reprise / Treaty

I wish there was a treaty we could sign
It's over now, the water and the wine
We were broken then but now we're borderline
And I wish there was a treaty,
I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine — Leonard Cohen

We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear. — Leonard Cohen

There's no forsaking what you love
no existential leap
as witnessed here in time and blood
a thousand kisses deep — Leonard Cohen

I am not the one who loved, it's love that chooses me.
When hatred with it's package comes, you forbid delivery. — Leonard Cohen

I love Tom [Waits] for the same reason I love Leonard Cohen, which is that they are both one-offs, templates; they both seemed old, or at least dressed old when they were young; both kind of lived their careers backwards. — Sylvie Simmons

Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time — Leonard Cohen

you know that I love/ to live with you/ but you make me forget so very much/ we forget to pray for the angels/ and then the angels forget to pray for us/ — Leonard Cohen

We've got to learn to love appearances. — Leonard Cohen

O God, make me poor enough
to love yurd diamond in the rough,
or in my failure let me see,
my greed raised to mistery.

Do you hate the one who must
turn your world all to dust?
Do you hate the ones who ask
if Creation wears a mask

God beyond the God I name,
if mask and fire are the same,
repair the seam my love leaps through ,
uncreated fire to pursue.

Network of cretated fire,
maim my love and my desire.
Make me poor so I may be,
servant in the world I see — Leonard Cohen

Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656-1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way? — Leonard Cohen

Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.-Leonard Cohen — Bailey Bristol

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

Love is not a victory march — Leonard Cohen

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

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.
A kite is a fish you have already caught
in a pool where no fish come,
so you play him carefully and long,
and hope he won't give up,
or the wind die down.
A kite is the last poem you've written
so you give it to the wind,
but you don't let it go
until someone finds you
something else to do. — Leonard Cohen

I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere. — Leonard Cohen

I felt like if any two people had any kind of sexual affinity for each other they had to sleep with each other immediately, otherwise it was a terrible betrayal and waste ... Fortunately, I'm relieved of those obsessions now. It's really wonderful. It's really wonderful not feeling you have to sleep with everybody. — Leonard Cohen

The Dream" "O I had such a wonderful dream, she said. I dreamed you made love to me. At last, he said to himself, the spirit has taken up some of the heavy work. — Leonard Cohen

I've always been curious. I keep a list of people I'd love to have lunch with, like the Pope or Leonard Cohen. I'll read an article about someone I've never met and think, 'I should ask him to lunch!' — Diane Sawyer

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. — Leonard Cohen

If you want a lover I'll do anything you ask.
If you want a different kind of love I'll wear a mask.
If you want to strike me down in anger here I stand.
If you want a partner in life take my hand.
I'm your man. — Leonard Cohen

I am not the one who loves -
It's love that chooses me. — Leonard Cohen

The Maestro says it's Mozart but it sounds like bubble gum when you're waiting for the miracle to come. — Leonard Cohen

I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater
and how i kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I'd
never been your lover — Leonard Cohen

It's you my love, you who are the stranger. — Leonard Cohen

A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love ... — Leonard Cohen

Love is a fire/It burns everyone/It disfigures everyone/It is the world's excuse for being ugly. — Leonard Cohen

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love — Leonard Cohen

Though I love your company, your instructions are wasted her. I will always choose the woman who caries me off, I will always sit with the family of loneliness. — Leonard Cohen

I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I'm just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep. — Leonard Cohen

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer — Leonard Cohen

Everytime you grab at love you will lose a snowflake of your memory — Leonard Cohen

A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love. — Leonard Cohen

Here is your cross, Your nails and your hill; And here is your love, That lists where it will — Leonard Cohen

Perhaps no line of Cohen's better captures the essence of his vision. He is telling his listeners what prophetically inclined rabbis have been telling theirs for thousands of years, namely that the world is a place of suffering, that no celestial cataclysm could ever change that, but that there are things here on this earth - art, love, friendship, kindness, music, sex - that have the power to redeem us. — Liel Leibovitz

The candles burned The moon went down The polished hill The milky town Transparent, weightless, luminous Uncovering the two of us On that fundamental ground Where love's unwilled, unleashed, unbound And half the perfect world is found. — Leonard Cohen

I'm in my father's car at age 9 or 10 crying to Leonard Cohen's 'Famous Blue Raincoat,' thinking that you could write nearly a love letter to a man who betrayed you by having an affair with your wife. I was thinking how wonderful and pure music can be for explaining situations. — Lou Doillon

A heavy burden lifted from my soul,
I heard that love was out of my control. — Leonard Cohen

In My Secret Life"
"I saw you this morning,
you were moving so fast.
Can't seem to loosen my grip
On the past.
And I miss you so much,
there's no one in sight.
And we're still making love
In my secret life.
I smile when I am angry,
I cheat and I lie,
I do what I have to do
to get by,
In my secret life. — Leonard Cohen

And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies. — Leonard Cohen

TRAVEL Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought Of travelling penniless to some mud throne Where a master might instruct me how to plot My life away from pain, to love alone In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake. Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost Enough to lose a way I had to take; Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust The will that forbid me contract, vow, Or promise, and often while you slept I looked in awe beyond your beauty. Now I know why many men have stopped and wept Halfway between the loves they leave and seek, And wondered if travel leads them anywhere - Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek, The windy sky's a locket for your hair. — Leonard Cohen

I bargain now. I offer buttons for his love. — Leonard Cohen

Blessed is the covenant of love, the covenant of mercy, useless light behind the terror, deathless song in the house of night. — Leonard Cohen

Love is the only engine of survival — Leonard Cohen

To the men and women who own men and women
those of us meant to be lovers
we will not pardon you
for wasting our bodies and time — Leonard Cohen

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips
it is because I hear a man climb stairs
and clear his throat outside our door. — Leonard Cohen

Show me slowly what I only know the limits of Dance me to the end of love — Leonard Cohen

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. — Leonard Cohen

We are not mad. We are human.We want to love, and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey. — Leonard Cohen

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem. — Leonard Cohen

I loved you for a long, long time
I know this love is real
It don't matter how it all went wrong
That don't change the way I feel
And I can't believe that time's
Gonna heal this wound I'm speaking of
There ain't no cure for love — Leonard Cohen

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

You don't know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I'm the little jew who wrote the Bible.
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival. — Leonard Cohen

I would love to work with Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, B.B. King. I'd love to do something with Arctic Monkeys, Miles Kane, and The Last Shadow Puppets. If I got a call from Juliette Lewis or PJ Harvey, or Chrissie Hynde, that'd be a thrill. — Imelda May

And here you are hurried, And here you are gone; And here is the love, That it's all built upon. — Leonard Cohen

Love me this first day of June.
I'd rather sleep with ashes than priestly wisdom.
Of all the lonely places in the world this is best where debris is human.
I kiss the precious ashes that fall from fiery flesh.
On these familiar shapes I lay my kisses down. — Leonard Cohen

I will starve till prophets find me,
I will bleed till angels bind me,
Still I sing till churches blind me,
Still I love till cog-wheels wind me. — Leonard Cohen

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love. — Leonard Cohen

And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross. — Leonard Cohen

All the musicians I loved growing up were men. I loved Leonard Cohen, Mick Jagger. I loved Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. Even today, I love Van McCann from Catfish and the Bottlemen and Matt Healy from The 1975. — Halsey

Maybe there's a god above but the only thing I learned from love was how to shoot at somebody who outdrew you. — Leonard Cohen

Every heart to Love will come, but like a refugee — Leonard Cohen

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. — Leonard Cohen

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

Now suzanne takes you hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From salvation army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For shes touched your perfect body with her mind. — Leonard Cohen