Bruce Cockburn Quotes

I call a fig a fig, a spade a spade.

There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light.

How thin and insecure is that little beach of white sand we call consciousness. I've always known that in my writing it is the dark troubled sea of which I know nothing, save its presence, that carried me. I've always felt that creating was a fearless and a timid, a despairing and hopeful, launching out into that unknown.

The public is in need of experiences that are not just voyeuristic. Our society is in a mess of losing its spiritual centre.

People see truth in my films. That's what they react to, and that's what they relate to.

I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

In all my movies, be it 'Page 3', 'Chandni Bar' or 'Corporate,' I have tried to depict honesty and reality.

Sometimes things feel hopeless. Not always within my own life - but looking outward, it seems like rough times lie ahead of us. The world seems to be kind of caving in on itself in a lot of ways. But I try to look on the bright side.

I really try to say things as they basically are and it so happens that it is a good message that things are getting better, but there are still problems.

We must make ourselves strong to meet a future which is dark and obscure.

O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellow creatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

If you look at 'The Have and the Have Nots,' I didn't want to write a show where everyone is great and wonderful and perfect. I wanted to write it so that you're not really sure who the haves are. You look at Hanna, and you see that she doesn't have much, but she has great faith.

I don't walk around saying everything is going to be wonderful.

No matter how dark or precarious it may seem, continue to pursue your truth.

Life's not always going to be bells and whistles.

The human race is ill because we have no contact with the lowest level of consciousness.

Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, roll darkly down the torrent of his fate.

All life is a struggle in the dark.

And worse I may be yet: the worst is not So long as we can say 'This is the worst.

Everything had been stripped of deceptions, that time. And that time I was afraid of everything.

There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.