Charles Bukowski Quotes

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

Life means a lot to me.

Opera is a key way of talking about life and all the things that are important to people in life.

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

Everything amounts to nothing if you don't love someone or something.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

The meaning of life is to get meaning for life.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

What we play is life.

Life is essentially a question of values.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

If you haven't got love, you've got nothing.

We spend so much of our lives not feeling but doing, doing, doing, and movies remind us that we are human. That life is all the things we see, and yet there is beauty there. There's a celebration of life and all of its intricacies. Movies are magnificent.

If you want the meaning of families and life and religion and philosophy rolled into one package, all you need to read is 'The Brothers Karamazov.'

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

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

I like the big questions.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

The word 'living' has so many connotations that I'm almost reluctant to try to define it scientifically because it sounds as if I'm then downgrading all the other significances of that word.

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.