Thomas Bernhard Quotations

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

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

What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,' the prince said, 'is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous

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.

Toda idea, al fin y al cabo, es una idea demencial.

We Can Only Exist By Taking Our Minds Off The Fact That We Exist

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.

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.

...He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.

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.

...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.

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

I really only write about inner landscapes and most people don't see them, because they see practically nothing within, because they think that because it's inside, it's dark, and so they don't see anything. I don't think I've ever yet, in any of my books, described a landscape. There's really nothing of the kind in any of them. I only ever write concepts. And so I'm always referring to "mountains" or "a city" or "streets." But as to how they look: I've never produced a description of a landscape. That's never even interested me.

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

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.

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

I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself...

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

Nothing but disaster follows from applause.

The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.

perfidious society masturbators

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.

Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death.

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

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

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

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

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.

Those are terrible people who don't like Glenn Gould... I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.

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

In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.

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.

The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.

After all, there is nothing but failure.

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

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

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.

What can you do. You get a name, you're called 'Thomas Bernhard', and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.

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.

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.

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.

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequethed their writings to me--I have no others.

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.

... Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.

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