Top 100 Thomas Bernhard Quotes (2024 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. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

6. “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

7. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “Ausgerechnet der Mensch ist unmenschlich.”

— Thomas Bernhard

14. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

19. “Nothing but disaster follows from applause.”

— Thomas Bernhard

20. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

30. “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

31. “Bosque, monte alto, tala”.”

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Io non ho mai avuto un padre e non ho mai avuto una madre, ma ho avuto sempre il mio Montaigne.”

— Thomas Bernhard

36. “Suddenly there’s an idea and it demands realization, our entire life, our entire existence consists only of such ideas demanding realization, once this process breaks off, our life breaks off, we’re dead. We consist of nothing but ideas that surface inside us and that we want to realize, that we must realize, or else we’re dead.”

— Thomas Bernhard

37. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

39. “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

40. “The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.”

— Thomas Bernhard

41. “Weng lies in a hollow, buried among blocks of ice for millions of years. The roadsides favor promiscuity.”

— Thomas Bernhard

42. “All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.”

— Thomas Bernhard

43. “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

44. “We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there’s no other motive except the even baser one of making money...”

— Thomas Bernhard

45. “Jede Existenz ist ein Milderungsgrund, geehrter Herr.”

— Thomas Bernhard

46. “I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself...”

— Thomas Bernhard

47. “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

48. “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

49. “Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.”

— Thomas Bernhard

50. “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.”

— Thomas Bernhard