Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski aims his plea at the very people he’s famous for needling: the self-protective, slightly superior passerby who thinks they’ve “made it” out of the pit. The line opens on “those faces” - anonymous, daily, easy to ignore - and then quietly detonates the moral hierarchy we build to keep ourselves comfortable. He doesn’t ask you to admire anyone. He asks you to stop pretending you’re exempt.

“Were not created entirely without hope” is classic Bukowski doublespeak: a grim compliment that still carries a pulse. He grants the street a sliver of dignity, but only by acknowledging the brutality that makes hope noteworthy in the first place. The phrasing suggests people aren’t simply failures or debris; they’re the product of pressure, luck, bad timing, cheap rent, cheap labor, and the long slow attrition of ordinary life. Hope survives, but barely, and that “entirely” is doing the heavy lifting.

Then comes the hinge: “be kind to them”. Not charitable. Not performatively compassionate. Kind - the smallest, least glamorous ethic, the one that costs you attention more than money.

The final sting, “like you they have not escaped”, flips the gaze back on the reader. “Escaped” implies a prison with no clear walls: wage work, addiction, loneliness, the daily humiliation of trying to stay afloat. In Bukowski’s Los Angeles - postwar, working-class, bar-lit, indifferent - the point isn’t that everyone is secretly the same. It’s harsher: no one is safely above the street. The difference between “them” and “you” is thinner than you’d like to believe.