Quotes from Thomas Bernhard

If we cannot become what we want to become, we resort to another person—inevitably the person closest to us—and make of him what we have been unable to make of ourselves

One day you're cut off, at the very start you're cut off and can't go back, the language you learn and the whole business of walking and all the rest is for the sake of the single thought, how to get back again.

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...

Seen from across the street, he was like someone to whom the world had long since given notice to quit but who was compelled to stay in it, no longer belonging to it, but unable to leave it.

The empty rooms always had a terribly depressing effect upon my father when he considered, he said, that the person who dwelt in them had to fill them solely with his own fantasies, with fantastic objects, in order not to go out of his mind.

Again and again we try to escape ourselves, but we fail in our efforts, constantly run our heads into the wall because we don't want to recognize that we can't escape ourselves, except in death.

In die Natur hineingehen und in dieser Natur ein- und ausatmen und in dieser Natur nichts als tatsächlich und für immer Zuhause zu sein, das empfände er als das höchste Glück. In den Wald gehen, tief in den Wald hinein, sagte der Burgschauspieler, sich gänzlich dem Wald überlassen, das ist es immer gewesen, der Gedanke, nichts anderes, als selbst Natur zu sein.

With its population made up of two categories of people, those who do business and those upon whom they prey, the city has only a painful life to offer the young person who goes there to learn and to study; for sooner or later anyone who lives there, whatever his constitution, becomes disturbed and is eventually deranged and destroyed by the city, often in the most deadly and insidious manner.

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

But simple people don't understand complicated ones and thrust the latter back on themselves, more ruthlessly than any others, I thought. The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people. A person goes to them in an extremely needy condition and begs desperately to be rescued and they thrust this person even more deeply into his own despair. And how are they supposed to save the extravagant one in his extravagance, I thought. Wertheimer

The essential elements of a person come to light only when we must regard him as lost to us, when everything he has done seems to have been a taking leave of us. Suddenly the true nature of everything about him that was merely preparation for his ultimate death becomes truly visible.

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

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.

Nothing but disaster follows from applause.

Jede Existenz ist ein Milderungsgrund, geehrter Herr.

y con ningua otra he hablado nunca sobre todo lo imaginable con mayor intensidad y, por tanto, disposición para comprender y, por tanto, he podido pensar con mayor intensidad y disposición para comprender sobre todo lo imaginable, y nadie me ha dejado nunca mirar nunca dentro de sí más profundamente y a nadie he dejado mirar nunca dentro de mí más profunda y desconsideradamente y cada vez más desconsiderada y profundamente.

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

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

And you realize that it was not those great minds and not those old masters which kept you alive for decades but that it was this one single person whom you loved more than anyone else.

Das allerdings ist ein absurder Gedanke. Andererseits sind, wie ich im Laufe meines Lebens jetzt schon mit Entschiedenheit weiß, gerade die absurden Gedanken die klarsten Gedanken und die absurdesten die wichtigsten überhaupt.

Los riachuelos que nos refrescan, ¿no son producidos por las tormentas?

Then he had kept himself to himself, in the way you might stick by a tree, which might be rotten, but at least it's a tree, and heart and understanding had been dismissed, pushed into the background.

For a long time we see only one side of a person's personality, because for reasons of self-preservation we do not wish to see any other, I thought, then suddenly we see all sides of their personality and are disgusted by them, I thought.