Top 100 Thomas Bernhard Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 3

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

— Thomas Bernhard

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

55. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

58. “If we cannot become what we want to become, we resort to another person – inevitably the person closest to us – and make of him what we have been unable to make of ourselves.”

— Thomas Bernhard

59. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

63. “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

64. “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

65. “But I’ve always been a genius of secrecy, I thought, quite unlike Wertheimer who basically couldn’t keep anything a secret, had to talk about everything, had to get everything out in the open as long as he lived. But naturally unlike most others we were lucky not to have to earn a cent because we had enough from the very beginning. Whereas.”

— Thomas Bernhard

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

70. “Whoever can’t laugh doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously...”

— Thomas Bernhard

71. “I barricaded myself and stared out the window, without seeing anything but my own unhappiness.”

— Thomas Bernhard

72. “A criminal is undoubtedly a poor soul, who is punished for his poverty.”

— Thomas Bernhard

73. “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

74. “For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness... By contrast, one might say that the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people.”

— Thomas Bernhard

75. “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

76. “The only friends I have are the dead who have bequethed their writings to me – I have no others.”

— Thomas Bernhard

Featured in: Reading Quotes

77. “It’s a folk art of sorts, I said to Hoeller, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilized in the form of lifelong controlled suffering, it’s an art possessed only by this people and those belonging to it.”

— Thomas Bernhard

78. “But simple people don’t understand complicated ones and thrust the latter back on themselves, more ruthlessly than any others, I thought. The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people. A person goes to them in an extremely needy condition and begs desperately to be rescued and they thrust this person even more deeply into his own despair. And how are they supposed to save the extravagant one in his extravagance, I thought. Wertheimer.”

— Thomas Bernhard

79. “Everything about everybody is nothing but diversion from death.”

— Thomas Bernhard

80. “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

81. “Anyone can bear a catastrophe, once it has occurred, by at least seeming to avoid it through keeping busy, no matter which work routine he forces himself into.”

— Thomas Bernhard

82. “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

83. “I’m waiting for the end now, you know! Just as you’re waiting for your end. Just as everyone’s waiting for their end. Only they don’t realize they’re waiting and waiting for what I’ve always been waiting for, namely the end!”

— Thomas Bernhard

84. “One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding, which we must put up with as a world composed solely of misunderstandings and which we depart from with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all.”

— Thomas Bernhard

85. “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

86. “We can exist at the highest degree of intensity for as long as we live.”

— Thomas Bernhard

87. “We may know for decades that someone close to us is a ridiculous person, but it’s only after a lapse of decades that we suddenly see it.”

— Thomas Bernhard

88. “Correction of the correction of the correction of the correction.”

— Thomas Bernhard

89. “When we follow this criminal-justice aspect of our world, and that means of our society, we experience miracles, as they say, on a daily basis.”

— Thomas Bernhard

90. “What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,′ the prince said, ’is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.”

— Thomas Bernhard

91. “I enter into a book and settle in it, neck and crop, you should realize, in one or two pages of a philosophical essay as if I were entering a landscape, a piece of nature, a state organism, a detail of the earth, if you like, in order to penetrate into it entirely and not just with half my strength or half-heartedly, in order to explore it and then, having explored it with all the thoroughness at my disposal, drawing conclusions as to the whole.”

— Thomas Bernhard

92. “Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.”

— Thomas Bernhard

93. “One actually finds most people uninteresting, I thought, all the time – almost all the people we meet are uninteresting, having nothing to offer us but their collective mediocrity and their collective imbecility, with which they bore us on every occasion, and so naturally we have no time for them.”

— Thomas Bernhard

94. “Incredible how rapidly the best relationship, if it is stressed beyond its capacity, wears thin and finally exhausts itself.”

— Thomas Bernhard

95. “He was the only world-famous piano virtuoso who abhorred his public and also actually withdrew definitively from this abhorred public.”

— Thomas Bernhard

96. “I’d always cared extremely little for public opinion because I was always obsessed with my own opinion and hence had no time at all for the public’s.”

— Thomas Bernhard

97. “We don’t have to be ashamed, but we are nothing, and we earn nothing but chaos.”

— Thomas Bernhard

98. “But of course the world consists only of absurd ideas.”

— Thomas Bernhard

99. “The thinking person who is idle appears as the greatest threat to those for whom idleness means simply doing nothing, who actually do nothing when they are idle.”

— Thomas Bernhard

100. “I want to see him clearly again with the help of these notes, these scraps of memory, which are meant to clarify and recall to mind not only the hopeless situation of my friend but also my own hopelessness at the time, for just as Paul’s life had once again run into an impasse, so mine too had run into an impasse, or rather been driven into one. I am bound to say that, like Paul, I had once more overstated and overrated my existence, that I had exploited it to excess.”

— Thomas Bernhard