Love Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski’s warning reads like a barroom sermon delivered with a busted lip: suspicious of politeness, allergic to consensus, and convinced that most social virtue is just camouflage for need. The repeated “beware” works as an incantation, less argument than survival tactic. It’s the voice of someone who’s watched praise curdle into obligation, watched “concern” become control, watched people collect rooms full of laughter because silence would expose the hollowness.

The intent isn’t subtle moral guidance; it’s triage. “Quick to praise” isn’t generosity here, it’s a transaction. Flattery becomes debt, and Bukowski wants you alert to the bill. “Quick to censor” nails his lifelong feud with respectability culture, the kind that calls itself protective while really protecting its own comfort. Censorship, in this frame, isn’t principled; it’s panic dressed up as taste.

Then he turns his knife on the true villain: the average. Not average as a neutral statistic, but average as a social machine that sands down anyone sharp enough to cut. “Beware their love” is the harshest line because it treats romance as another enforcement mechanism. Average love “seeks average”: it doesn’t just prefer the familiar, it recruits you into it. Subtext: intimacy can be a domestication project, a soft insistence that you stop being difficult, stop being strange, stop wanting more than the approved allotment.

Context matters: Bukowski wrote from the margins (class, institutions, literary gatekeepers), and his cynicism is partly autobiography, partly pose. The pose is the point. He’s not offering comfort; he’s offering a crude kind of freedom: distrust the crowd’s applause, distrust its scolding, and protect the part of you that doesn’t translate into social approval.