Best Quotes by Thomas Bernhard (Top 10)

  1. Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.
  2. It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.
  3. ... 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. The only friends I have are the dead who have bequethed their writings to me—I have no others.
  9. 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.
  10. You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.

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