Samuel Beckett Quotes

Words are all we have.

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

I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.

Two in distressmake sorrow less.

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

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

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

Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.

Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.

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.

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

Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.

All has not been said and never will be.

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

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

I had little talent for happiness.

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

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

I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.

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

If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.

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

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

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

God is a witness that cannot be sworn.

It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

Make sense who may. I switch off.

Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede.

No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.

James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.

The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).

Better hope deferred than none.

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

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 goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.

Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.

The only sin is the sin of being born.

That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

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

What is that unforgettable line?

Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.

The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.

How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.

What is more true than anything else? To swim is true and to sink is true. One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak onlyof the mess.

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.

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

Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.

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!