Top 321 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Beckett - Page 2

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

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

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

What are we doing here, that is the question.

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

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.

Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.

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.

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.

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.

To restore silence is the role of objects.

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

There's never an end for the sea.

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

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

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

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

All has not been said and never will be.

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!

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

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.

With all this darkness round me I feel less alone.

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

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

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.

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

When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.

The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.

Better hope deferred than none.

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.

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.

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 essential doesn't change.

We all are born mad. Some remain so.

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.

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.

The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.

That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.

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

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

Fail, fail again, fail better.

Mysterious affair, electricity.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Two in distressmake sorrow less.

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