Charles Bukowski Quotes

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

Everything is dead while it lives.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

People "died" all the time. . . . Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out. . . you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside-safe and dead.

life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

One life is worth the universe. Poe was able to go right into the very depth of life and to demonstrate this.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

And in which we say that life is eternal but continue to struggle to survive.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.

I've jokingly said that everything I'm doing now is filling up the hours before I die, but I do feel that slightly. I have no religious beliefs so this is the ride. This is it. So I'm just like anyone, I suppose, trying to fill out the days in the most interesting way possible.

Hurried and worried until we're buried, and there's no curtain call, Lifes a very funny proposition after all.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. 'Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won't? How do I know there's anything there except what I'm conscious of?'

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own... the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

I am infected with life and will die of it in time.

Life is short, and therefore, one thing being certain, death, let us take up a great ideal, and give up the whole life to it. For what is the value of life, this vegetating little low life of man? Subordinating it to one high ideal is the only value that life has.

Let's learn to live, for we must die alone.

Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I.

Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above absurdity.

I like to think that death gives life meaning. I like that philosophy.