Quotes by Thomas Bernhard

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

On the one hand we cant be alone, people like us; on the other we cant stand company. We cant stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because its totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time.

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.

He wanted to be an artist, an artist of life wasnt enough for him, although precisely this concept provides everything we need to be happy if we think about it.

We have relinquished and abandoned and left behind and forgotten what we believed we had to relinquish, abandon and leave behind and ultimately forget; we have let ourselves go and we have gone away and we have gone under, but we have relinquished nothing and abandoned nothing and left behind nothing and forgotten nothing; we have in reality extinguished nothing whatsoever, because our parents did not inform us of or enlighten us about the fact that our life-process is in reality nothing but a process of illness. We were up above, in the company of our parents, locked up in our walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us was nothing but lethal and we are down below, without our parents, again locked up in these walls and in our rooms and in our books and papers and everything around us and in us is nothing but lethal.

I dont belong to the masses, Ive been against the masses all my life, and Im not in favour of dogs.

The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid fear must not lead us to conceal the facts and so to falsify the whole of human history -- which is of course part of natural history -- and pass it on in falsified form just because it is customary to do so, when we know that all history is falsified and always transmitted in falsified form.

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 its the worst possible condition, because, if it is, were finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and its better to die having made the journey were been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.

We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.

The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.

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