Thomas Bernhard quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Thomas Bernhard on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

It is better to read twelve lines of a book with the utmost intensity and thus to penetrate into them to the full

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

It is not just Gould's playing but the fact that he stopped playing, turned his back on the world, that fascinated Bernhard. It

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

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

Because in the end nothing matters all that much, as he also wrote on another slip, and on his last slip he'd written, it's all the same.

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

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

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

Almost everybody we get together with about a matter, even if it is of the highest importance, is incompetent.

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

But instead of thinking about my book and how to write it, as I go pacing the floor, I fall to counting my footsteps until I feel about to go mad.

When we think, we know nothing, everything is open, nothing, so Roithamer.

What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell the truth and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth.

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

Time destroys everything we do, whatever it is.

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

He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.

Literature is not conceivable without philosophy or the other way round

Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.

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

Man is a wretched creature and death is a certainty - 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.

After all, there is nothing but failure.

I know nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me.

Nature, not yet polluted by human beings, hence his early rising.

If that handsome fellow were a cripple he wouldn't repel me, but he isn't a cripple, he is that handsome fellow, so he repels me ...

Nothing but disaster follows from applause.

But of course the world consists only of absurd ideas.

The whole process of life is a process of deterioration in which everything - and this is the most cruel law - continually gets worse.

Every person is a unique and autonomous person and actually, considered independently, the greatest artwork of all time ...

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

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

We fill our mental strong-room with these great minds and old masters and resort to them at the crucial moment in our lives;

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

Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with.

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

I don't belong to the masses, I've been against the masses all my life, and I'm not in favour of dogs.

Everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

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

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

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

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

But of course it was precisely this destruction process of my beloved Steinway that I had wanted.

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.

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.

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

Everything about everybody is nothing but diversion from death.

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

The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter - that has always been my ideal.

A body needs at least
three points of support,
not in a straight line,
to fix its position,
so Roithamer had written.

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

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

Whoever can't laugh doesn't deserve to be taken seriously...

To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glen in One... Glen Steinway, Steinway Glen, all for Bach.

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

He abhorred people who said things that hadn't been thought through, thus he abhorred almost all mankind.

All schools are bad and the one we attend is always the worst if it doesn't open our eyes. What

Wertheimer was afraid of losing his unhappiness and killed himself for this and no other reason, I thought, with