Thomas Bernhard Quotes

The first effect of adjusting to other people is that one becomes boring.

We are almost always bored by just those whom we must not find boring.

Here, whatever is not boring is not English.

People want the tragedy. They need things to go wrong, they need the tension. In my characters there’s a core of trust and love that I’m very committed to. These guys would die for each other, and it’s very beautiful. But at the same time, you can’t keep that safety. Things have to go wrong, bad things have to happen.

The polite of every country seem to have but one character. A gentleman of Sweden differs but little, except in trifles, from one of any other country. It is among the vulgar we are to find those distinctions which characterize a people.

I have closely noted that people who watch a great deal of TV never again seem able to adjust to the actual pace of life. The speed of the passing images becomes the speed the aspire to and they seem to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else.

Why would you get up there and bore people? I never have figured that out. These people are supposedly in the entertainment industry, and they finally get up there to that podium and they become the most boring people in the world.

Narrative and characters have always interested me. I never tried to alienate an audience. Of course, gradually, I wanted a bigger and bigger space to draw people in, so it's very organic [growth].

Virtue and decency are so nearly related that it is difficult to separate them from each other but in our imagination.

People of good character are not all going to come down on the same side of difficult political and social issues. Good people - people of character and moral literacy - can be conservative, and good people can be liberal. We must not permit our disputes over thorny political questions to obscure the obligation we have to offer instruction to all our young people in the area in which we have, as a society, reached a consensus: namely, on the importance of good character, and some of its pervasive particulars.

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. It was a scandal that a breed of fearless and sinister people ran around freely, so they attached a nickname and a myth to these people to get even with them, to make up for the many times they had felt afraid.

Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

A person of “good character” was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community

Nothing is as boring as other people's dreams.

People are always so boring when they band together. You have to be alone to develop all the idiosyncrasies that make a person interesting.

The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.

Boredom and fear keep us working and obeying the laws.

There is no sin worse in life than being boring and nothing worse than letting other people tell you what to do.

Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.

It sure is boring to be around people who are in character all the time. I always find it's closer to mental illness than acting excellence.

People today are desperate for leaders, but they want to be influenced only by individuals they can trust, persons of good character.

The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.

Pigmentation was a quick and convenient way of judging a person. One of us, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once proposed we instead judge people by the content of their character. He was shot.

I've always believed in populating my films with characters who we like, who we have some warmth for, who have warmth for each other, who we would like to hang out with, who we emulate in one way or another. It's not that they all get along, or that there aren't bad people or people we make fun of. But at the core, there's a kind of sweetness.

In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring.