Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhardwas an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth9 February 1931
CountryAustria
together add cacophony
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
views practice people
In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
crazy goes-on mystery
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.
art philosophical unbearable
The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.
anime
After all, there is nothing but failure.
suicide way admiration
All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.
night rivers inspiring-love
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
depressing dog people
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.
years names woods
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.
real genuine existence
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.
arrogance use world
Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world, a world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it's only feigned.
character people boring
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.
writing too-late lost
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.
journey worry goes-on
... 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.