Leonard Cohen Quotes

Torah values are the ones that inform my life.

Success is survival.

I never had huge amounts of money when I was young. I had huge amounts of fame, and I always had the sense of labor and recompense. I always said I don’t want to work for pay, but I want to get paid for my song.

You live your life as if it’s real,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.

You go your way
I’ll go your way too

You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you’re actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.

Women stand for the objective world for a man, and they stand for the thing that you’re not. And that’s what you always reach for in a song.

When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.

When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.

When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That’s about all you can do.

When I speak of depression, I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse. I’m happy to report that, by imperceptible degrees and by the grace of good teachers and good luck, that depression slowly dissolved and has never returned with the same ferocity that prevailed for most of my life.

Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I’ve practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity.