Leonard Cohen Quotes

I think sometimes you can grow up with faith, or if you're just the kind of animal who grabs onto it or doesn't grab onto it. I wasn't a big grabbing-onto-it kind of animal. I found my faith to be more about my belief, my spirituality, about nature.

We are committed to raising our children as Jews. I knew that it had to start with me at a greater level, at a deeper level, if it was going to be a meaningful example to them.

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.

We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.

When my children were born, I made the choice I wanted them to be raised as Jews and to have a Jewish education.

I went to Hebrew school but opted out of a bar mitzvah.

I think that it doesn't matter if I travel all over the place. I'll always be a normal teenager on the inside. It always depends on how you act yourself, not what happens to you. That's my view of it all.

The purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves.

Now if the study of the Scriptures be necessary to our happiness at any time in our life, the sooner we begin to read them, the more we shall be attached to them.

If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.

A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you . . . Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself alone, one question . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use.

I felt I should have been the happiest person in the world. But I looked inside, and that happiness was only on the surface, not so deep. Beneath it was hollow. Up until that time, I had been thinking meditation was a joke, a fad and a waste of time.

I have no religion because I was born and raised Jewish. And on the first night of Hanukkah, my parents, when I was very young, gave me a top to play with. They called it a dreidel. I knew it was a top. And as I looked at that top, I said, 'You know. I don't think I'm gonna be Jewish for very long.

I went to Catholic school for 12 years and went to church every Sunday. I may not do that anymore but I think it gave me a good basis. I've also explored things on my own different philosophies and spiritual teachings and I use what works for me.

I love exploring the past lives, just because I think it adds so much dimension to a personality.

Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.

I was looking for something within Judaism that had a spiritual nature and not just a religious nature. So my trainer at the time was the one who took me to the Kabbalah center on my 40th birthday. I was like, "Oh, this is so cool." I was just ready for it. I was ready for something different.

I don't think you ever learn just one thing. At some point you start unlearning things. I have been working hard to unlearn everything I know.

What I think I'll do is I'll do my best to yank Debbie out of me by the roots. And then I'll turn up on your doorstep, one day when you least expect it, and I'll hope by then you will have given up on your vampire.

Our goal as women should be to discover who we are and not who we think we should be or who the world wants us to be. It's not our responsibility to be arm candy!

I was in school at the time, but at this time I'm in college. I'm holding up this bible and I say, God, who are you?And so I do nothing for the next two years of my life, virtually, but stay in the word of God and find out what is the answers to life.

I've always loved teaching acting. I think it helps me to kind of get back to basics. It's like a refresher course for me as well, so in a sense, I'm hopefully learning as much as my students are - or at least discovering or re-discovering as much as they are. I find that when I teach, I'm reminded of my own sort of failings. I'm reminded of where I sometimes keep going wrong.

I even move out onto the front porch and see my own limited view of the world. I want to take that world, and for the first time ever, I feel like I can do it. I’ve survived everything I’ve had to so far. I’m still standing here.

No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself.

Should I be what I think? But I think about being so many things!