Samuel Beckett Quotes

To what will love not stoop!

We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?

They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.

HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something? CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!

We all are born mad. Some remain so.

Unhappy, but not unhappy enough.

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

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.

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.

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

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

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.

Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.

Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.

Yes, I dont know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.

My keepers, why keepers, I'm in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it's to make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away.

Where you have nothing, there you should want nothing.

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

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.

When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.

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

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

It was the only way to progress, to stop.

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.

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

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

The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.

Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.

it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one

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

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

Sloth is all passions the most powerful.

Enough to know no knowing.

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

What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

What was God doing with himself before the creation?

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.

An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.

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.

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.

That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.

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

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?

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

Estragon: I can't go on like this. Vladimir: That's what you think.

Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.