Best Quotes by Thomas Bernhard (Top 10)
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Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.
Thomas Bernhard
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It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.
Thomas Bernhard
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... 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
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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.
Thomas Bernhard
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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
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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
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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.
Thomas Bernhard
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The only friends I have are the dead who have bequethed their writings to me—I have no others.
Thomas Bernhard
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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
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You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.
Thomas Bernhard
More Thomas Bernhard Quotes
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After all, there is nothing but failure.
Thomas Bernhard
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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.
Thomas Bernhard
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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
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All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.
Thomas Bernhard
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All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.
Thomas Bernhard
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Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
Thomas Bernhard
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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.
Thomas Bernhard
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The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.
Thomas Bernhard
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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.
Thomas Bernhard