Top 100 Thomas Bernhard Quotes
#1. We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.
Thomas Bernhard
#2. You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life
a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
Thomas Bernhard
#3. Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world, a world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it's only feigned.
Thomas Bernhard
#4. Literature is not conceivable without philosophy or the other way round
Thomas Bernhard
#5. If that handsome fellow were a cripple he wouldn't repel me, but he isn't a cripple, he is that handsome fellow, so he repels me ...
Thomas Bernhard
#7. Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.
Thomas Bernhard
#8. And you realize that it was not those great minds and not those old masters which kept you alive for decades but that it was this one single person whom you loved more than anyone else.
Thomas Bernhard
#9. We Can Only Exist By Taking Our Minds Off The Fact That We Exist
Thomas Bernhard
#10. Nature, not yet polluted by human beings, hence his early rising.
Thomas Bernhard
#11. A body needs at least
three points of support,
not in a straight line,
to fix its position,
so Roithamer had written.
Thomas Bernhard
#12. Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.
Thomas Bernhard
#13. When we think, we know nothing, everything is open, nothing, so Roithamer.
Thomas Bernhard
#14. Lawyers make nothing but confusion ... A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he's a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he's always right.
Thomas Bernhard
#15. He wanted to be an artist, an artist of life wasn't enough for him, although precisely this concept provides everything we need to be happy if we think about it.
Thomas Bernhard
#16. It is not just Gould's playing but the fact that he stopped playing, turned his back on the world, that fascinated Bernhard. It
Thomas Bernhard
#17. He abhorred people who said things that hadn't been thought through, thus he abhorred almost all mankind.
Thomas Bernhard
#18. When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in, in every state that we imagine ourselves in.
Thomas Bernhard
#19. Glenn died at the perfect moment, I thought, but Wertheimer didn't commit suicide at the perfect moment, whoever commits suicide never commits suicide at the perfect moment, whereas a so-called natural death always occurs at the perfect moment. Wertheimer
Thomas Bernhard
#20. We always look for everything in the immediate proximity, that is a mistake.
Thomas Bernhard
#22. Wertheimer was afraid of losing his unhappiness and killed himself for this and no other reason, I thought, with
Thomas Bernhard
#23. To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glen in One... Glen Steinway, Steinway Glen, all for Bach.
Thomas Bernhard
#24. I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself ...
Thomas Bernhard
#26. We have always preferred to be operated on by the assistants of famous surgeons who are also always famous medical professors, and not by those surgeons and professors themselves.
Thomas Bernhard
#27. That he was actually born into a giant fortune, all his life hadn't had any use for this giant fortune, had always been unhappy with this giant fortune, I thought. That his parents had been unable, as they say, to open his eyes, that they were the ones who depressed the child, I thought.
Thomas Bernhard
#28. But of course it was precisely this destruction process of my beloved Steinway that I had wanted.
Thomas Bernhard
#29. The essential elements of a person come to light only when we must regard him as lost to us, when everything he has done seems to have been a taking leave of us. Suddenly the true nature of everything about him that was merely preparation for his ultimate death becomes truly visible.
Thomas Bernhard
#30. When we do something, we may not think about why we are doing what we are doing, says Oehler, for then it would suddenly be totally impossible for us to do anything.
Thomas Bernhard
#31. We had taken him for a Norwegian ship's captain and had come to his table to hear some more about seafaring, not about philosophy, from which, indeed, we had fled north from Central Europe.
Thomas Bernhard
#32. Everything about everybody is nothing but diversion from death.
Thomas Bernhard
#33. The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.
Thomas Bernhard
#34. We run away from one thing into the other and destroy ourselves in the process, he said. We just simply go away until we have given up, so he said. Preference
Thomas Bernhard
#35. Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.
Thomas Bernhard
#36. Years later the world confirmed my judgment, but this only pained me, like everything confirmed by the newspapers. We exist, we don't have any other choice, Glenn
Thomas Bernhard
#37. The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me
I have no others.
Thomas Bernhard
#38. All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.
Thomas Bernhard
#39. We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money ...
Thomas Bernhard
#41. We fill our mental strong-room with these great minds and old masters and resort to them at the crucial moment in our lives;
Thomas Bernhard
#42. Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with.
Thomas Bernhard
#43. The loser was a born loser, I thought, he has always been the loser and if we observe the people around us carefully we notice that these people consist almost entirely of losers like him, I said to myself, of
Thomas Bernhard
#44. I don't belong to the masses, I've been against the masses all my life, and I'm not in favour of dogs.
Thomas Bernhard
#45. All schools are bad and the one we attend is always the worst if it doesn't open our eyes. What
Thomas Bernhard
#47. But instead of thinking about my book and how to write it, as I go pacing the floor, I fall to counting my footsteps until I feel about to go mad.
Thomas Bernhard
#48. A criminal is undoubtedly a poor soul, who is punished for his poverty.
Thomas Bernhard
#49. What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell the truth and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth.
Thomas Bernhard
#50. I know nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me.
Thomas Bernhard
#51. Weng lies in a hollow, buried among blocks of ice for millions of years. The roadsides favor promiscuity.
Thomas Bernhard
#52. One day you're cut off, at the very start you're cut off and can't go back, the language you learn and the whole business of walking and all the rest is for the sake of the single thought, how to get back again.
Thomas Bernhard
#53. The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter - that has always been my ideal.
Thomas Bernhard
#54. When we meet the very best, we have to give up, I thought.
Thomas Bernhard
#55. But of course the world consists only of absurd ideas.
Thomas Bernhard
#56. Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
Thomas Bernhard
#57. But we don't always have to be studying something, I thought, it's perfectly enough merely to think, to do nothing but think and give our thoughts free rein. To give in to our philosophical worldview, simply submit to our philosophical worldview, but that's the hardest thing, I thought. Wertheimer
Thomas Bernhard
#58. Because in the end nothing matters all that much, as he also wrote on another slip, and on his last slip he'd written, it's all the same.
Thomas Bernhard
#60. The teacher who isn't a genius is made into a teacher of genius by the student of genius at this precise moment for a very precise time period, I thought. But
Thomas Bernhard
#61. It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.
Thomas Bernhard
#62. We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.
Thomas Bernhard
#63. Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
Thomas Bernhard
#64. I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.
Thomas Bernhard
#65. Whoever can't laugh doesn't deserve to be taken seriously...
Thomas Bernhard
#66. The empty rooms always had a terribly depressing effect upon my father when he considered, he said, that the person who dwelt in them had to fill them solely with his own fantasies, with fantastic objects, in order not to go out of his mind.
Thomas Bernhard
#67. Seen from across the street, he was like someone to whom the world had long since given notice to quit but who was compelled to stay in it, no longer belonging to it, but unable to leave it.
Thomas Bernhard
#68. Then he had kept himself to himself, "in the way you might stick by a tree, which might be rotten, but at least it's a tree," and heart and understanding had been dismissed, pushed into the background.
Thomas Bernhard
#69. People seek the society of others who are exciting, disconcerting and volatile, who are never the same from one moment to the next and usually change complexion completely.
Thomas Bernhard
#70. People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other.
Thomas Bernhard
#71. Those are terrible people who don't like Glenn Gould ... I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.
Thomas Bernhard
#72. Almost everybody we get together with about a matter, even if it is of the highest importance, is incompetent.
Thomas Bernhard
#73. Again and again we try to escape ourselves, but we fail in our efforts, constantly run our heads into the wall because we don't want to recognize that we can't escape ourselves, except in death. Now
Thomas Bernhard
#74. The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.
Thomas Bernhard
#75. I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.
Thomas Bernhard
#76. Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent.
Thomas Bernhard
#77. Children are begotten by their parents out of sheer malice and dragged into the world out of the greatest imaginable inconsiderateness.
Thomas Bernhard
#78. It is better to read twelve lines of a book with the utmost intensity and thus to penetrate into them to the full
Thomas Bernhard
#79. Every person is a unique and autonomous person and actually, considered independently, the greatest artwork of all time ...
Thomas Bernhard
#80. The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.
Thomas Bernhard
#81. To our horror, the very neighbor whom we had for decades thought of as the best natured and hardest working and, we always thought, the most contented of all our neighbors has turned out to be a murderer.
Thomas Bernhard
#82. On the one hand we can't be alone, people like us; on the other we can't stand company. We can't stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it's totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time.
Thomas Bernhard
#83. Man is a wretched creature and death is a certainty - Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard
#84. He was the only world-famous piano virtuoso who abhorred his public and also actually withdrew definitively from this abhorred public.
Thomas Bernhard
#86. The Loser proceeds to narrate the same story he tells in virtually every one of his plays and novels: a story of frustrated ambition and (incestuous) love, suicide, and the generally grotesque absurdity of existence. But
Thomas Bernhard
#87. You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.
Thomas Bernhard
#88. For everyone says something repeatedly and is misunderstood, this is the only point where everybody understands everybody else, he said, I thought. One
Thomas Bernhard
#89. The whole process of life is a process of deterioration in which everything - and this is the most cruel law - continually gets worse.
Thomas Bernhard
#90. myself. We constantly portray and judge people only in false terms, we judge them unjustly and portray them meanly, I said to myself, in every instance, no matter how we portray, no matter how we judge them. Such
Thomas Bernhard
#91. Shaking people up." Finally, art was for both of them not an end in itself but a way of achieving an ascetic renunciation of the world. "Art should be given the chance to phase itself out," Gould
Thomas Bernhard
#92. In the end we remember all the students we've gone to school with and invite them to our homes only to find out that we no longer have the least thing in common with them, I thought.
Thomas Bernhard
#93. What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,' the prince said, 'is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous
Thomas Bernhard
#94. I had to spend my entire childhood in the Altensam dungeon like an inmate doing time for no comprehensible reason, for a crime he can't remember committing, a judicial error probably.
Thomas Bernhard
#95. She herself had never had enough money and never enough time and hadn't even been unhappy once, in contrast to those she called refined gentlemen, who always had enough money and enough time and constantly talked about their unhappiness. She
Thomas Bernhard
#96. Hotel Waldhaus
We had no luck with the weather and the guests at our table were repellent in every respect. They even ruined Nietzsche for us. Even after they had had a fatal car accident and had been laid out in the church in Sils, we still hated them.
Thomas Bernhard
#97. Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
Thomas Bernhard
#98. arts, I said, just like that in painting, in literature, I said, even philosophers are ignorant of philosophy. Most artists are ignorant of their art. They have a dilettante's notion of art, remain stuck all their lives in dilettantism, even the most famous artists in the world. We
Thomas Bernhard
#99. I doubted whether this work was truly worth something and was thinking of destroying it upon my return, everything we write down, if we leave it for a while and start reading it from the beginning, naturally becomes unbearable and we won't rest until we've destroyed it again, I thought. Next
Thomas Bernhard
#100. All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.
Thomas Bernhard
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