Samuel Beckett Quotes

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

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

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.

The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.

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

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.

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.

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

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.

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

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

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

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

We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.

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!

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

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.

Mysterious affair, electricity.

Fail, fail again, fail better.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

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

Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.

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

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.

Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.

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.

The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.

I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.

So all things limp together for the only possible.

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.

The essential doesn't change.

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

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.

All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing.

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

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

To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.

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

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.

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

I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?

Habit is a great deadener.

Words are all we have.