Leonard Cohen Quotes

If you look at life with any honesty and intelligence, it's clear that human nature is dark, vile, selfish, and despondent. But I also see a force in human nature, namely grace, that sometimes works against our natural moral entropy.

Do you know my friend that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desire and aptitudes?

Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion.

It's Godlike to love man - even in his sin - merely because he's man.

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.

Blind is his love, and best befits the dark.

When women love, they forgive everything...

I'll take you to the deepest, darkest, hottest lover's lane for a little spark in the dark.

It would seem that zeal is not an effect of love. For zeal is a beginning of contention.

She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well.

I would also hope that readers receive a larger understanding, or a different understanding, of what it means to be human, than they might have had before. We suffer from being quick to judge, quick to make excuses for ourselves and others, and I would like the reader to feel that we are all, more or less, in a similar state as we love and disappoint one another, and that we try, most of us, as best we can, and that to fail and succeed is what we do.

Life is unjust, people can be cruel, and yet if you harden your heart, you will lose what little love there is in this world.

Is it not the great end of religion, and, in particular, the glory of Christianity, to extinguish the malignant passions; to curb the violence, to control the appetites, and to smooth the asperities of man; to make us compassionate and kind, and forgiving one to another; to make us good husbands, good fathers, good friends; and to render us active and useful in the discharge of the relative social and civil duties?

Wherever your heart rests There I will live and be blessed I've tried to line up the things I Needed to say but now my feelings just Tumble from me. I am half foolish, Half drunk with wanting you With wanting to take your hand And leap into the darkness of whatever Life will bring. Love makes me Brave and without love I'm made Nothing.

"I love mankind," he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."

Love makes saints or sinners out of men.

I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth.

To forgive all is as inhuman as to forgive none

Love is a spirit all compact of fire.

I thought the force of my wanting must wake ye, surely. And then ye did come. . ." He stopped, looking at me with eyes gone soft and dark. "Christ, Claire, ye were so beautiful, there on the stair, wi' your hair down and the shadow of your body with the light behind ye…." He shook his head slowly. "I did think I should die, if I didna have ye," he said softly. "Just then.

Walk with care in dark places, and do not put your faith in anyone who promises you the forgiveness of the Lord or a certain place in Paradise.

Love." She looked at me with those blue eyes. "Isn't it astonishing how confused and complicated such a small,simple word is? It attracts so many other things, doesn't it, that stick to it like barnacles on rock...fear, guilt. Need. You can't even see the rock anymore. I imagine love in its purest form is a rare thing.

The human heart is a dark forest.