"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Every artist was first an amateur. "
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."
— e.e. cummings

"Live to the point of tears."
— Albert Camus

"Wherever you go, go with all your heart."
— Confucius

"I have been treated better than I should have been---not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women."
— Charles Bukowski (What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire)

"Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think that money was so valuable?"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
— Albert Camus

"Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about… say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
"
— Charles Bukowski

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"to fight for each minute is to
fight for what is possible within
yourself,
so that your life and your death
will not be like
theirs."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)

"I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart) "
— e.e. cummings

"Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe."
— Henry David Thoreau

"The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honor life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant."
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Always do what you are afraid to do."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way."
— Charles Bukowski

"it was like any other
relationship, there was
jealousy on both sides,
there were split-ups and
reconciliations.
there were also fragmented moments of
great peace and beauty.

I often tried to get away from her and
she tied to get away from me
but it was difficult:
Cupid, in his strange way, was really
there.


"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"I suppose like others
I have come through fire and sword,
love gone wrong,
head-on crashes, drunk at sea,
and I have listened to the simple sound of water running
in tubs
and wished to drown"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? "
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

"
— Charles Bukowski

"they say that
nothing is wasted:
either that
or
it al is"
— Charles Bukowski

"The more crap you believe, the better off you are."
— Charles Bukowski

"we had such tremendous fun
and much agony together
for some years"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are."
— Charles Bukowski (What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire)

"sometimes there's nothing to say
about
death."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"pull a string, a puppet moves ...

each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand --
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,
I don't know ..."
— Charles Bukowski (Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame)

"my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.
"
— Charles Bukowski

""Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking." -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)
"
— Charles Bukowski (Women: A Novel)

"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
"
— Charles Bukowski

"Lovers alone wear sunlight."
— e.e. cummings

"i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh ... And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new."
— e.e. cummings

"nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility"
— e.e. cummings

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche