Thomas Bernhard Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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

Thomas Bernhard
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
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
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
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.

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Bernhard