Top 100 Thomas Bernhard Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself...”

— Thomas Bernhard

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

71. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

83. “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

84. “Correction of the correction of the correction of the correction.”

— Thomas Bernhard

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

92. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

95. “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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

97. “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

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

— 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. “But the city doesn’t grab anyone under the arms: on the contrary, it constantly seeks to fend off the unfortunate people who repair to it in search of a career, to destroy them and annihilate them.”

— Thomas Bernhard