Samuel Beckett Quotes

Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.

I gave up before birth.

Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.

Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Vladimir: I don't understand. Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you? Vladimir uses his intelligence. Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.

We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.

I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place...that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.

When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.

The only thing you must never speak of is your happiness.

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.

The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.

How hideous is the semicolon.

Love requited is a short circuit.

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

To what will love not stoop!

All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability.

It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go.

I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.

Sloth is all passions the most powerful.

The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.

There's no lack of void.

The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

Nothing is more real than nothing.

Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever.

All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

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. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.

I am still alive then. That may come in useful.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

Yes, light, there is no other word for it.

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.

Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

If you don't know where you are currently standing, you're dead.

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.

I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun.

Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.