Samuel Beckett Quotes

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

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

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

There's never an end for the sea.

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

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.

Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of.

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

Words are all we have.

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

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

The only sin is the sin of being born

Habit is a great deadener.

Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.

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.

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

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

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

Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.

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.

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.

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

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.

To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.

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

Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea.

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.

For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.

There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.

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

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

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.

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.

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

But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other, (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity.)

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

The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.

What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail ? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vice versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors.

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

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.

My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.

To restore silence is the role of objects.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

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

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

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.

Fail, fail again, fail better.