Samuel Beckett Quotes

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.

The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.

Light black. From pole to pole.

Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?

Lick your neighbor as yourself!

I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.

Two in distressmake sorrow less.

I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.

The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.

The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

Let us do something, while we have the chance! ... Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

Make sense who may. I switch off.

We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?

The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).

The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.

That penny farthing hell you call your mind

God is a witness that cannot be sworn.

To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.

If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the "Naught is more real ..." and the "Ubi nihil vales ..." both already in Murphy and neither very rational.

it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one

Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.

The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?

What do we do now, now that we are happy?

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praisefrom your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before.

Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most

But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.

All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.

I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.

Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede.

VLADIMIR: What do they say? ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives. VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.

[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.

POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.

The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.