Leonard Cohen Quotes

What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones.

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Always do something different from the others.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

When you create something new, you're breaking tradition - which is an act of defiance.

We won't be different for different's sake. Different is easy... make it pink and fluffy! Better is harder. Making something different often has a marketing and corporate agenda.

I don't find myself so exercised by a desperation to be new.

We're not ever interested in repeating ourselves or doing what people expect us to do, it's such a turn off.

We have no precedents to guide us, and that is a glorious thing, for precedents, like other guides are disposed to grow tyrannical and refuse to let us do anything on our own initiative. Life grows wearisome in the countries where precedents and conventionality is rule and nothing can happen unless it has happen before.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

The man with a new idea is a crank until his idea succeeds.

I'm someone who always wants to do everything differently. If I have a pattern, I'd rather I didn't have a pattern. I want every book to be unpredictable and new. Damn it!

I want to do something that people have not seen before... surprise everyone. There has to be variety in work.

The movies I do have to be different in some way. Nothing vanilla will do.

Every revolutionary poet or lyricist has been criticised for something. If you come up with something new, there will always be people who will object to it.

Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. They are people who stand out and speak up. Originals drive creativity and change in the world. They're the people you want to bet on.

You have to be unique.

Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.

All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

What I've learned over the years is that the path less traveled always makes for a more interesting journey. If you simply do what everyone else is doing, how can you ever expect to excel and create something wonderful and unique in your life?

Every day I wake up and that’s my goal, to be on a constant quest for knowledge and do something different, being unique and being uncommon.

I have always been ahead of my time.

I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.