Top 100 Thomas Bernhard Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”

— Thomas Bernhard

2. “We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.”

— Thomas Bernhard

3. “The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.”

— Thomas Bernhard

4. “Ausgerechnet der Mensch ist unmenschlich.”

— Thomas Bernhard

5. “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

6. “We Can Only Exist By Taking Our Minds Off The Fact That We Exist.”

— Thomas Bernhard

7. “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

8. “The fear of school is the worst fear there is. Most people are ruined by it. If not in childhood, then later on. It’s still possible to die from fear of school at sixty.”

— Thomas Bernhard

9. “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

10. “It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.”

— Thomas Bernhard

11. “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

12. “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

13. “All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.”

— Thomas Bernhard

14. “Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.”

— Thomas Bernhard

15. “The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.”

— Thomas Bernhard

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Der Mensch geht immer nur so weit, wie er glaubt, dass die Welt geht.”

— Thomas Bernhard

21. “After all, there is nothing but failure.”

— Thomas Bernhard

22. “Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one.”

— Thomas Bernhard

23. “You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.”

— Thomas Bernhard

24. “The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter – that has always been my ideal.”

— Thomas Bernhard

25. “It is not necessary to read all of Goethe or all of Kant, it is not necessary to read all of Schopenhauer; a few pages of Werther, a few pages of Elective Affinities and we know more in the end about the two books than if we had read them from beginning to end, which would anyway deprive us of the purest enjoyment.”

— Thomas Bernhard

26. “Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.”

— Thomas Bernhard

27. “Nothing but disaster follows from applause.”

— Thomas Bernhard

28. “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

29. “Children are begotten by their parents out of sheer malice and dragged into the world out of the greatest imaginable inconsiderateness.”

— Thomas Bernhard

30. “Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.”

— Thomas Bernhard

31. “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

32. “When we meet the very best, we have to give up, I thought.”

— Thomas Bernhard

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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.”

— Thomas Bernhard

41. “We see so much sadness if we care to look.”

— Thomas Bernhard

42. “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

43. “Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we’ve locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, that’s the truth.”

— Thomas Bernhard

44. “We always look for everything in the immediate proximity, that is a mistake.”

— Thomas Bernhard

45. “The only advice i can offer to any thinking person is to kill himself before the millennium.”

— Thomas Bernhard

46. “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

47. “Toda idea, al fin y al cabo, es una idea demencial.”

— Thomas Bernhard

48. “For a long time we see only one side of a person’s personality, because for reasons of self-preservation we do not wish to see any other, I thought, then suddenly we see all sides of their personality and are disgusted by them, I thought.”

— Thomas Bernhard

49. “Bosque, monte alto, tala”.”

— Thomas Bernhard

50. “All schools are bad and the one we attend is always the worst if it doesn’t open our eyes. What.”

— Thomas Bernhard