Leonard Cohen Quotes

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.

Hope is only the love of life.

Love is possible. Life is going to decide. Don't lose it, it's a treasure. It's going to be painful; it's going to be an adventure, a roller coaster. Life is a roller coaster and it gets worse when you get old. Contrary to what you think, that it gets better when you know more - no, the more you know the more painful it is. You've been hurt. You arrive with a million scars and your armor is not thick. The more you age, the more you're fragile. But do it anyway. Go for it. Otherwise it means death.

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love.

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).

I fight with love and i laugh with rage....you gotta live light enough to see the humor, and long enough to see some change.

Hope has as many lives as a cat or a king.

Though they go mad they shall be sane, though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion.

When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.

Your life is a work of art, and in the end, the underlying theme of great art is bravery and hope and love.

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can.

The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.

Never, ever, ever think that your life is over, but know always that each day, each hour, each moment is another beginning, another opportunity, another chance to re-create yourself anew.

Life is stronger than death.

What is that which can never die It is that faithful force that is born into us that one that is greater than us that calls new seed to the open and battered and barren places so that we can be resown. It is this force in its insistence in its loyalty to us in its love of us in its most often mysterious ways that is far greater far more majestic and far more ancient than any heretofore ever known.

It won't be a normal life-I know that. But it will be a life. A life together.

..the fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes...and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.

Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?

In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.