Charles Bukowski Quotes

Humanity, you never had it from the beginning." That was my motto.

Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.

People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics.

I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

I find nothing more depressing than optimism.

I do get cynical, but what can you do? It doesn't make any difference.

People are no damned good.

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

A man that could look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hand.

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

In a world that's ugly and a lie, it's hard to even want to try.

I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad.

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden apple-trees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man—as he had long suspected—was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated.

Skepticism turns to cynicism, which leads to apathy and despair, which can cause sleeplessness, dry-mouth, and loss of sex drive?

I see the whole concept of Generation X implies that everyone has lost hope.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

As human beings we're so cynical, so uncompassionate.

In the current climate, we live in a pessimistic and non-idealistic world.