Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski’s line is a barroom dare disguised as life advice: if you see the herd moving, bolt. The intent isn’t just contrarian swagger; it’s a defense mechanism from a writer who made a career out of turning social failure into a kind of grim authority. “The crowd” in Bukowski is never a neutral public. It’s the office, the polite party, the literature scene with its prizes and manners - the machinery that rewards performance over pulse. Calling them “always wrong” is deliberately absolute, more curse than thesis, because absolutes are how you torch a room quickly.

The subtext is suspicion of consensus as a substitute for taste. Bukowski’s speakers don’t trust what’s widely liked because popularity, to him, often signals dilution: art sanded down to fit the market, morality reduced to slogans, ambition disguised as virtue. Running “in the other direction” isn’t pure independence so much as choosing loneliness over being managed. There’s also a sneaky self-justification baked in: if the crowd is always wrong, then being ignored starts to look like proof you’re right.

Context matters. Bukowski wrote from the margins - working-class drudgery, addiction, cheap rooms - and he watched institutions anoint respectability while leaving whole lives unacknowledged. The quote works because it’s both a warning and a temptation: it flatters the reader as a singular soul, then dares them to earn it by refusing the easy comfort of agreement.