Samuel beckett quotes

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

Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.

Birth was the death of him.

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

...you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, 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

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

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

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

My mistakes are my life.

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

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

Habit is a great deadener.

There's never an end for the sea.

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

Was I asleep? Had I slept?

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.

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

Do we mean love, when we say love?

Fail, fail again, fail better.

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

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

Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.

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.

He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.

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

How long have I been here, what a question, I've often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary.

All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway.

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

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

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

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

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.

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

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' You won't believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly 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.

But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying. I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.

That double-headed monster of damnation and salvation--Time.

The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

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

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

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

People are bloody ignorant apes.

To restore silence is the role of objects.

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

The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.

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

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.

That's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

All has not been said and never will be.

All life long, the same questions, the same answers.

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.

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

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

We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench

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

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.

Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

With all this darkness round me I feel less alone.

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.

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

Nothing is more real than nothing.

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.

Mysterious affair, electricity.

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

What are we doing here, that is the question.

It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

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.

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

The day you die is just like any other, only shorter.

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

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.

I can't go on. I'll go on.

To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?

We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.

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.

Unhappy, but not unhappy enough.

To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.

It is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.

The only sin is the sin of being born.

It was the only way to progress, to stop.

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.

Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.

God is a witness that cannot be sworn.

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

Better hope deferred than none.

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

In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe.

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

What was God doing with himself before the creation?

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

I had little talent for happiness.

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.

Words are all we have.

That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

The essential doesn't change.

The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.

Two in distressmake sorrow less.

As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.

What is that unforgettable line?

Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.

All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but strech out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity.

But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.

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

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

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.

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

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

But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!

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

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

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.