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

Thomas Bernhard Quotes

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

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

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

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

— Thomas Bernhard

The loser was a born loser, I thought, he has always been the loser and if we observe the people around us carefully we notice that these people consist almost entirely of losers like him, I said to myself, of.

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

But of course the world consists only of absurd ideas.

— Thomas Bernhard

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

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

Correction of the correction of the correction of the correction.

— Thomas Bernhard

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

— Thomas Bernhard

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

We see so much sadness if we care to look.

— Thomas Bernhard

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

The only advice i can offer to any thinking person is to kill himself before the millennium.

— Thomas Bernhard

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
More Thomas Bernhard Quote >>
Privacy Policy   6.00ms  0.71MB