Charles Bukowski Quotes

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

Which would prove I'm a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people i love?

I feel completely alone - it's like melting, I am the structure, and I am also Alain Robert.

The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won’t I? in pitiful indecision.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

I nod, because I do understand. I'm just not sure how to go about divorcing myself from the evil I've already accepted.

Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.

I wish they were all dead and we were, too. It would be best." Well, there's no good response to that. I can hardly dispute it since I was walking around with a syringe to kill Peeta when I found them. Do I really want him dead? What I want...what I want is to have him back.

My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.

It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.

My conscience aches but it's going to lose the fight.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

For you to be successful, sacrifices must be made. It's better that they are made by others but failing that, you'll have to make them yourself.

Got demons on both shoulders.

Nothing is more seductive for a man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

It is seldom that statesmen have the option of choosing between a good and an evil.

One day, I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation... I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards - and, of course, the whip God gave me.

Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it.

The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity.