The Loser Quotes

“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.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Again and again we picture ourselves sitting together with the people we feel drawn to all our lives, precisely these so-called simple people, whom naturally we imagine much differently from the way they truly are, for if we actually sit down with them we see that they aren't the way we've pictured them and that we absolutely don't belong with them, as we've talked ourselves into believing, and we get rejected at their table and in their midst as we logically should get after sitting down at their table and believing we belonged with them or we could sit with them for even the shortest time without being punished, which is the biggest mistake, I thought. All our lives we yearn to be with these people and want to reach out to them and when we realize what we feel for them are rejected by them and indeed in the most brutal fashion.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“I barricaded myself and stared out the window, without seeing anything but my own unhappiness.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“From early childhood he had experienced the wish to die, to commit suicide, as they say, but never was totally concentrated. He could never come to terms with being born into a world that basically repulsed him in every detail from the very beginning. He grew older and thought that his wish to die would suddenly no longer be there, but this wish grew more intense from year to year, without ever becoming totally intense and concentrated. My constant curiosity got in the way of my suicide, so he said, I thought. We never forgive our fathers for having sired us, nor our mothers for having brought us into the world, he said, nor our sisters for continuing to be witnesses to our unhappiness. To exist means nothing other than we despair, he said. When I go to bed I have no other wise than to die, never to wake up, but then I wake up again and the awful process repeats itself, finally repeats itself for fifty years, he said. To think that for fifty years we don't wish for anything other than to be dead and are still alive and can't change it because we are thoroughly inconsistent, so he said. Because we are wretched, vile creatures. No musical ability! he cried out, no life ability!”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“We study better in hostile surroundings than in hospitable ones, a student is always well advised to choose a hostile place of study rather than a hospitable one, for the hospitable place will rob him of the better part of his concentration for his studies, the hostile place on the other hand will allow him total concentration, since he must concentrate on his studies to avoid despairing,”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“All my tendencies are deadly ones, he once said to me, everything in me has a deadly tendency to it, it's in my genes, as Wertheimer said, I thought. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless world in which everything is always devastating and deadly. That's why he especially loved Dostoevsky and all his disciples, Russian literature in general, because it actually is a deadly literature, but also the depressing French philosophers.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Every person is a unique and autonomous person and actually, considered independently, the greatest artwork of all time...”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“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.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“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 who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“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”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“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.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“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.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Λέμε μια λέξη και εκμηδενίζουμε έναν άνθρωπο.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“All this time I’ve been talking about the human sciences and don’t even know what these human sciences are, don’t have the slightest clue, he said, I thought, been talking about philosophy and don’t have a clue about philosophy, been talking about existence and don’t have a clue about it, he said. Our starting point is always that we don’t know anything about anything and don’t even have a clue about it, he said,”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“In the end we remember all the students we've gone to school with and invite them to our homes only to find out that we no longer have the least thing in common with them, I thought.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Whoever can't laugh doesn't deserve to be taken seriously...”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“He wanted to be an artist, an artist of life wasn't enough for him, although precisely this concept provides everything we need to be happy if we think about it.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“I took a few steps toward the kitchen window although I'd already realized I couldn't look through the kitchen window because, as already mentioned, it's covered with filth from top to bottom. Austrian kitchen windows are all totally filthy and we can't look through them and naturally it's to our greatest advantage, I thought, not to be able to look through them because then we find ourselves staring into the mouth of catastrophe, into the chaos of Austrian kitchen filth.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Years later the world confirmed my judgment, but this only pained me, like everything confirmed by the newspapers. We exist, we don’t have any other choice, Glenn”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Through constant self-sacrifice I had thoroughly ruined life in Desselbrunn for myself, one day it suddenly became unbearable, I thought. The beginning of this self-sacrifice had been the rejection of my Steinway, the triggering moment so to speak for my subsequent inability to tolerate life in Deselbrunn. All at once I could no longer breathe the Desselbrunn air and the walls in Desselbrunn made me sick and the rooms threatened to choke me, one has to remember how cavernous the rooms are there, nine-by-six meter or eight-by-eight meter rooms, I thought. I hated those rooms and I hated what was in those rooms and when I left my house I hated the people outside my house, all at once I was being unjust to all those people, who only wanted the best for me, but precisely that drove me crazy after a while, their constant willingness to be helpful, which I suddenly found profoundly revolting. I barricaded myself and stared out the window, without seeing anything but my own unhappiness. I ran outdoors and cursed at everybody. I ran into the woods and huddled beneath a tree, exhausted.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Öğrenim gördüğümüz yerdeki çevre bize düşmansa, bize dostça bakan çevrede olduğundan daha iyi çalışırız, öğrenim gören kişi ona dost olan çevre yerine, düşman olan çevreyi seçerse daha iyi eder, çünkü ona dost olan çevre eğitimine vereceği dikkatin büyük bir bölümünü alıp götürür, düşman çevre ise ona yüzde yüz bir eğitim sağlar, çünkü o bu eğitime yoğunlaşmak zorundadır, umutsuzluğa kapılmamak için, böyle bakıldığında Salzburg büyük bir olasılıkla tüm öteki güzel denilen kentler içinde eğitim için mutlaka önerilir, ama yalnızca güçlü bir kişiliği olana, zayıf biri orada kısa sürede kuşkusuz yitip gider.”
― Sezer Duru, De onderspitdelver

“But people didn’t understand what I meant, as usual—when I say something, they don’t understand it, for what I say doesn’t mean that I said what I said, he said, I thought. I say something, he said, I thought, and I’m saying something completely different—thus I’ve spent my entire life in misunderstandings, in nothing but misunderstandings, he said, I thought. We are, to put it precisely, born into misunderstanding and never escape this condition of misunderstanding as long as we live—we can squirm and twist as much as we like, it doesn’t help. But everyone can see this, he said, I thought—for everyone says something repeatedly and is misunderstood, this is the only point where everybody understands everybody else, he said, I thought.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding, which we must put up with as a world composed solely of misunderstandings and which we depart from with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Овде све супруге, заиста је употребила реч супруге, морају да рачунају с тим да ће им мужеви упасти у млин за папир или да ће им млин за папир бар одсећи једну руку или неколико прстију, рече, у ствари, сваки дан се догађа да млин за папир повреди неког од њих и у крају живе само мушкарци које је млин за папир осакатио. Деведесет процената свих мушкараца раде овде у фабрици папира, рече. С децом ове немају других планова, него да их пошаљу у фабрику папира, рече, већ генерацијама траје исти механизам, помислих. А ако фабрика пропадне, рече, онда ће сви остати на цедилу.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“The Loser proceeds to narrate the same story he tells in virtually every one of his plays and novels: a story of frustrated ambition and (incestuous) love, suicide, and the generally grotesque absurdity of existence. But”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“The so-called intellectual consumes himself in what he considers pathbreaking work and in the end has only succeeded in making himself ridiculous, whether he’s called Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, it doesn’t matter, even if he was Kleist or Voltaire we still see a pitiful being who has misused his head and finally driven himself into nonsense. Who’s been rolled over and passed over by history. We’ve locked up the great thinkers in our bookcases, from which they keep staring at us, sentenced to eternal ridicule, he said, I”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“But to go hiking or even to go for a walk in the country—that I can’t do. It makes no sense to me at all, I can’t commit this sort of nonsense, I won’t commit the crime of this nonsense.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“When we cross the threshold of our fiftieth year we see ourselves as base and spineless, I thought, the question is how long we can stand this condition.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“I doubted whether this work was truly worth something and was thinking of destroying it upon my return, everything we write down, if we leave it for a while and start reading it from the beginning, naturally becomes unbearable and we won’t rest until we’ve destroyed it again, I thought.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Everything about Wertheimer didn't come from Wertheimer himself, I said to myself now, everything about Wertheimer was always taken from somebody else, copied, he took everything from me, he copied me in everything, and so he even took my failure from me and copied it, I thought. Only his suicide was his own decision and came completely from him, I thought, and so he may have experienced, as they say, a sense of triumph in the end. And perhaps thus, by committing suicide on his own so to speak, he had outstripped me in everything, I thought.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser