A Quote by Leonard Cohen

As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.

Leonard Cohen

Quote Topics

Awaits Beauty Came Casually Confines Defeat Dignity Done Express Great Grew Inevitable Instructions Lament Must Never Older Strict Understood Us Voice Were Within

Quote Author

Leonard Cohen
Canadian - Novelist
September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016

One of the things I write about a bit in my Madam Secretary memoir is on Rwanda, where I was an instructed ambassador at the U.N., and my instructions were to not vote for increased forces there, and I didn't like my instructions. So I got up and called Washington and said, "Change my instructions," and they didn't.

Madeleine Albright

When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.

Richard Dawkins

Openness by the leader paves the way for ownership by the people. Without ownership, changes will be short term. Changing people's habits and ways of thinking is like writing instructions in the snow during a snowstorm. Every twenty minutes the instructions must be rewritten, unless ownership is given along with instructions.

John C. Maxwell

When we speak of the dust of the lotus feet of the Spiritual Master, we are speaking of humble approach to serve his instructions. Unless we humbly serve the instructions of the great soul, it is Krishna's arrangement the He never reveals Himself.

Radhanath Swami

I can play guitar - but I can't really. I wouldn't say I'm talented at it. I just kind of watch videos on YouTube, and I follow the instructions... OK, yeah, my hidden talent: I'm good at following instructions!

Chloe Kim

Some applauding Steve Harvey for the instructions he gave, others simply horrified by the instructions that one feels necessary to give in this the freest land in all the earth, in 2016, the United States of America.

Chris Hayes

I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, 'Make sure the person in the photograph is smiling.' And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness.

Douglas Coupland

In our system, we leave questions of fact to a jury. But to render a verdict, a jury must know the law. For this, we rely upon jury instructions. Instructions are supposed to translate the law into lay terms that the jury can apply to the facts as they determine them.

Alafair Burke

Hypnosis is about shutting down the conscious mind and re-igniting the unconscious and the imagination, so while I give instructions to them under hypnosis, the contestants might interpret those instructions in all kinds of ways.

Keith Barry

That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be.

John Lennon

Sometimes God gives instructions that go against conventional wisdom, such as treating people kindly when they're hateful. Who really wants to do that? Instructions like that may not always make sense, so that's why I need to trust and obey the One who inspired them.

George Foreman

I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors.

Adolf Eichmann

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it.

Raoul Vaneigem

Christ didn't leave us a book of instructions; He left us a body, a family - a Church. If it were perfectly clear, there wouldn't be any freedom.

Francis George

Climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong, in the possibility to give adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions and the resulting compliance or non-compliance of those who are supposed to follow these instructions.