Samuel Beckett Quotes

All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.

I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. 'Nothing is more real than nothing.' They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.

There is this to be said for Dachsunds of such length and lowness as Nelly, that it makes very little difference to their appearance whether they stand, sit or lie.

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

I try. I fail. I try again. I fail better.

Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.

Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.

Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.

...and a dream away in space with neither her nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away. Nor for in the end again by degrees or as though switched on dark falls there again that certain dark that alone certain ashes can. Through it who knows yet another end beneath a cloudless sky of a last end if ever there had to be another absolutely had to be.

Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was, forgot to be.

Better hope deferred than none.

Was I asleep? Had I slept?

To find a form that accommodates the shape of the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.

What are we doing here, that is the question.

We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.

And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine . . . "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?

Yes, I dont know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.

My keepers, why keepers, I'm in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it's to make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away.

My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.

Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.

What is more true than anything else? To swim is true and to sink is true. One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak onlyof the mess.

Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.

The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never.

Birth was the death of him.

Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.

For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

And what I have, what I am, is enough, was always enough for me, and as far as my dear little sweet little future is concerned I have no qualms, I have a good time coming.

Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.

The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.

I had little talent for happiness.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.

Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.

The only sin is the sin of being born.

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

Do you always believe in the life to come? Mine was always that.

There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.

What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!

The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.