Leonard Cohen Quotes

God forgive me if I do wrong in following with ardor the strongest instincts of my nature.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

I don't know if I would be a good cop. As gruff as I come off, I take things very emotionally.

I was really conflicted. I had always planned to help the world. Instead, I was going to become an actress? That seemed like such a selfish thing to do.

A man may quarrel with himself alone; that is, by controverting his better instincts and knowledge when brought face to face with temptation.

She sits before me, sullen but hopeful, characterless, about to dissolve into tears. I squeeze her hand back, moved, no, touched by her ignorance of evil. She has one more test to pass. Do you own a briefcase?” I ask her, swallowing.

Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?

Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?

I've gone through a lot of different phases on what I do and why I do it - morally and ethically. I've tortured myself about it, especially in dealing with success and money.

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.

What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?

Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.

If I cried me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?

How easy it is to be compassionate when it's yourself you see in trouble.

None but God would ever have thought of justifying me. I am a wonder to myself.

The devil on my right shoulder must have brutally strangled the angel on my left.

Passion persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.

My toughest enemy is in the mirror - would you look at that.

We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

I talk openly about my past and what I've gone through - abuse being something that was very real in my household, and a lot of chaos growing up as a child. I think that I naturally just gravitated towards music that I could really feel on a deep level - and that meant sadness. I was able to connect with that at a really young age.