Charles Bukowski Quotes

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.

L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie' re ve? rite? . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.

It is best not to have been born at all: but, if born, as quickly as possible to return whence one came.

It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister. "Ah, well," he said out loud quietly. "That's just the way things are. Life's a funny business." Death, he supposed, was the punch line.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.

The way of surviving is to find meaning in suffering.

The purpose of existence is to exist. It is too fantastic to have a meaning.

Il n'y a pas d'autre univers qu'un univers humain, l'univers de la subjectivite humaine. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.

the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

I hear my father-in-law's response..."Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

Everything is absurd.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

We are the spirit, the collective conscience. We create the pain, and suffering, and beauty in this world.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.