Charles Bukowski Quotes

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.

The worst of faces still is human.

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.

People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

Cynicism stems from disappointment. Cynical and faithless people were not always like that. They were filled with possibilities and hope as kids. But they tried and perhaps failed.

If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.

I think by now I have made it fairly clear that I am not very happy with the word hope. I don't believe in people just hoping.

I do get cynical, but what can you do? It doesn't make any difference.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

Hope is a tease designed to prevent us from accepting reality.

False hope really makes you cynical.

False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment , anger and hopelessness.

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

Are all humans human, or are some more human than others?

In a world that's ugly and a lie, it's hard to even want to try.

I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad.

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.