Quotes by Thomas Bernhard

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”

“everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death”

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

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

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

“Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone wh...”

“After my parents were dead, I found in a box and in two chests of drawers nothing but hundreds of bright red Alpine caps, I said, nothing but bright red Alpine stockings. Every one of them knitted ...”

“When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in, in every state that we imagi...”

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

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

“The whole process of life is a process of deterioration in which everythingand this is the most cruel lawcontinually gets worse.”

“There is nothing more dreadful than having to go walking on ones own on Monday.”

“When we do something, we may not think about why we are doing what we are doing, says Oehler, for then it would suddenly be totally impossible for us to do anything.”

“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.”

“The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art histo...”

“People are always talking about it being their duty to find their way to their fellow men to their neighbour, as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false sentiment when in fact it i...”

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

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

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

“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, becaus...”