161 Quotes by Thomas Bernhard

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

Everything about everybody is nothing but diversion from death.

We run away from one thing into the other and destroy ourselves in the process, he said. We just simply go away until we have given up, so he said. Preference.

I enter into a book and settle in it, neck and crop, you should realize, in one or two pages of a philosophical essay as if I were entering a landscape, a piece of nature, a state organism, a detail of the earth, if you like, in order to penetrate into it entirely and not just with half my strength or half-heartedly, in order to explore it and then, having explored it with all the thoroughness at my disposal, drawing conclusions as to the whole.

It’s a folk art of sorts, I said to Hoeller, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilized in the form of lifelong controlled suffering, it’s an art possessed only by this people and those belonging to it.

The fear of school is the worst fear there is. Most people are ruined by it. If not in childhood, then later on. It’s still possible to die from fear of school at sixty.

Children are begotten by their parents out of sheer malice and dragged into the world out of the greatest imaginable inconsiderateness.

Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we’ve locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, that’s the truth.

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.