The line closes a paragraph in “A Bad Trip,” which first ran as a Notes of a Dirty Old Man column in the underground paper Open City for 27 September–3 October 1967. It was collected by City Lights in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972) at p. 440, and reprinted in Tales of Ordinary Madness (1983) at p. 200.
“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it — basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them” Charles Bukowski, "A Bad Trip," in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (City Lights Books, 1972), 440 — first printed as a "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column in Open City, September 27–October 3, 1967; reprinted in Tales of Ordinary Madness (City Lights Books, 1983), 200. Verified via Quotle.info.
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Provenance
Where the line actually comes from
Piece
“A Bad Trip” (1967)
First printed
As a Notes of a Dirty Old Man column in Open City, 27 September–3 October 1967
Collected in
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (City Lights, 1972), p. 440
Reprinted in
Tales of Ordinary Madness (City Lights, 1983), p. 200
I have met free men in the strangest of places and at ALL ages — as janitors, car thieves, car washers, and some free women too — mostly as nurses or waitresses, and at ALL ages. the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it — basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
“A Bad Trip” · 1967
Bukowski wrote his Open City columns in trademark all-lowercase, so the sentence begins “the free soul,” not “The free soul.” The capitalised version that circulates online is a later tidy-up.
This is not a public-domain text. The column dates to 1967 and the book that first collected it, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, was published by City Lights in 1972 ↗ — comfortably inside US copyright, as is the 1983 Tales of Ordinary Madness reprint. The short passage above is quoted for identification and comment.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What travels wrong
The words really are Bukowski’s. What gets mangled is where they came from, how they are worded, and what they are about.
Pinned over sunsets and couples, it reads as a love line. In the essay it sits inside an argument that most people are conditioned into obedience by the age of seven or eight — a piece about acid, television and conformity ↗.
✓Genuine Bukowski, correctly placed: the sentence ends a paragraph in “A Bad Trip,” his Open City column of 27 September–3 October 1967, collected at p. 440 of the 1972 City Lights volume — per the Bukowski Database record ↗.
Context
An acid essay, not a love letter
“A Bad Trip” opens with Bukowski noticing that LSD and colour television reached American living rooms at roughly the same moment, and that the country outlawed one and ruined the other. The argument that follows is about conditioning: bad trips, he claims, are mostly caused by people who were trained and frightened into shape long before they ever swallowed anything — most of them captured, he writes, by the age of seven or eight. The hippie slogan about not trusting anyone over thirty gets no mercy either; thirty, he says, means nothing.
The famous sentence arrives as the exception to that gloom. Free people exist, he insists, and he has met them in unglamorous places — janitors, car thieves, car washers, nurses, waitresses — at every age. The test he offers is not a description but a sensation: you identify a free soul by how you feel standing next to one. Read in place, it is a line about escaping social training, not about falling in love.
You identify a free soul by how you feel standing next to one.
Read the full story
Bukowski’s Open City columns were set in lowercase throughout, which is why the authentic sentence begins “the free soul is rare.” Almost every version online silently capitalises it, and many also swap his dash for a comma or a full stop.
The 1972 City Lights omnibus was later split in two: half became Tales of Ordinary Madness and half became The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, both in 1983. That is why the same line is variously credited to a 1972 book and a 1983 one. Both credits are right; neither is the first appearance.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1920–1994 · Los Angeles poet, novelist & underground columnist
Born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach, Germany, on 16 August 1920 and raised in Los Angeles, he spent years in low-wage work and the US Post Office before Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin put him on a stipend in 1969 so he could write full time. From 1967 he produced Notes of a Dirty Old Man, a column for the underground paper Open City — the source of most of the prose City Lights later gathered into Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. He died in San Pedro, Los Angeles, on 9 March 1994.
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Cite this
Primary source
Bukowski, Charles. “A Bad Trip.” In Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, 440. City Lights Books, 1972. First printed as a “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column in Open City, September 27–October 3, 1967; reprinted in Tales of Ordinary Madness (City Lights Books, 1983), 200.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it — basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-free-soul-is-rare-but-you-know-it-when-you-see-it/