Philosophy Quote by Leonard Cohen — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Who could have foretold”

“so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...”

“first of all nothing will happen”

“Bind me to your will, bind me with these threads of sorrow, and gather me out of the afternoon where I have torn my soul on twenty monstrous altars, offering all things but myself.”

“Deprivation is the mother of poetry.”

“At first first nothing will happen to us”

“[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary.”

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”

“Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.”

“In one manner or the other it still remains true that, even in the view of the mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross.”

“It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.”