Charles Bukowski Quotes

Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.

No matter how hard it rains, withstand the pain.

It's amazing how much punishment we can take.

Nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.

Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.

Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.

You can and you must expect suffering.

We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.

Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.

Affliction may one day smile again; and till then, sit thee down, sorrow!.

The Lesson You've Got to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth's bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I've made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one's a god.

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.

We're not the only people that have had to suffer, there have always been people that've had to.

Life is very hard, isn't it? It does kill you, after all.

Suffering has always been with us; does it really matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.

All we are asked to bear we can bear.

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.

You can't get around pain and opposition, but you can try to be joyful in the trial, and thank yourself for the trial, and thank God for the strength to get through it.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.

I learned during all my career to enjoy suffering.

I will continue to keep fighting sucking the marrow out of life as life sucks the marrow out of me.

I didn't mind a bit of hardship.

How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.