Samuel Beckett Quotations

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

If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

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

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

We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.

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.

You're on earth. There's no cure for that.

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

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.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.

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

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

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.

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

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

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

For why be discouraged, one of thieves was saved, that is a generous percentage.

Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.

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

The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.

I've tried not to exaggerate the glory of athletes. I'd rather, if I could, preserve a sense of proportion, to write about them asexcellent ballplayers, first-rate players. But I'm sure I have contributed to false values--as Stanley Woodward said, "Godding up those ballplayers." The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Enough to know no knowing.

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 don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.

No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.

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.

I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant

Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away.

You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.

How hideous is the semicolon.

I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.

You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.

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. *1937

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.

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

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

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?

I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of — how shall I say, I don’t know.

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.

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

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.

It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come

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!

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

Unhappy, but not unhappy enough.

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.

Was I asleep? Had I slept?

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

Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange.

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

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg. Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.

Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.

My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.

Lick your neighbor as yourself!

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.

What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity. A pity I should have to give tongue at the same time, it prevents it from bleeding in peace, licking the lips.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I still smile it's not worth the trouble any more for a long time now it's not been worth the trouble the tongue spring goes into the mud I stay like this not thirsty any more the tongue goes back into the mouth it closes it has to make a straight line now it's done I've made the image.

I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?

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.

If I was dead, I wouldn't know I was dead. That's the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

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

Habit is a great deadener.

Sloth is all passions the most powerful.

Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!

The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.

Love requited is a short circuit.

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

God is love. Yes or no? No.

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

Adulterers, take warning, never admit.

Imagination at wit's end spreads its sad wings.

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.

Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.

...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.

I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

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.

What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?