Charles Bukowski Quotes

We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.

--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.

Life is a process of losing our illusions, until we finally lose the illusion that we're alive.

Dying men think of funny things-and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men.

Eventually, we all end up alone.

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

Life begins when a person first realizes how soon it will end.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

Life is wasted on the living.

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.

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

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.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.