"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Love
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Love
1649 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Love →
Related Quotes
"Rakkaus alkaa tuijotuksel. (Satakunta) (KNM)"
"Ei lemmestä leluksi. (Northern Bothnia) (SMS)"
"Ei rakkaus ole potaatti, se on sipuli tai lanttu. (Juva, Savonia) (MMT)"
"Armastusel on paari silmi peas. (EVS)"
"Amor, tosse e fumo, malemente si nascondono."
"Amor tutti eguaglia."
"Die Liebe wintert nicht; Nein, nein! Ist und bleibt FrĂĽhlings-Schein."
": Love knows no winter; no, no! It is, and remains the sign of spring."
"At first, she loved nought else but flowers, And then—she only loved the rose; And then—herself alone; and then— She …"
"The warrior for the True, the Right, Fights in Love's name; The love that lures thee from that fight Lures thee to sh…"