Top 400 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

— Samuel Beckett

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes, Encouraging Quotes

2. “Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”

— Samuel Beckett

Featured in: Dance Quotes

3. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

— Samuel Beckett

4. “Fail, fail again, fail better.”

— Samuel Beckett

5. “You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.”

— Samuel Beckett

6. “Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.”

— Samuel Beckett

Featured in: Silence Quotes

7. “Where am I, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

— Samuel Beckett

Featured in: Silence Quotes

8. “What are we doing here, that is the question.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

10. “Nothing is more real than nothing.”

— Samuel Beckett

Featured in: Real Quotes

11. “We all are born mad. Some remain so.”

— Samuel Beckett

12. “What do we do now, now that we are happy?”

— Samuel Beckett

13. “Words are the clothes thoughts wear.”

— Samuel Beckett

14. “Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!”

— Samuel Beckett

15. “How hideous is the semicolon.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

17. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

18. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

21. “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

24. “That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.”

— Samuel Beckett

25. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

27. “ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this. VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.”

— Samuel Beckett

28. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

29. “People are bloody ignorant apes.”

— Samuel Beckett

30. “God is love. Yes or no? No.”

— Samuel Beckett

31. “Make sense who may. I switch off.”

— Samuel Beckett

32. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes off and I’m as intelligent as ever.”

— Samuel Beckett

Featured in: Intelligent Quotes

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

36. “Words are all we have.”

— Samuel Beckett

37. “I am still alive then. That may come in useful.”

— Samuel Beckett

38. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

41. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

43. “My mistakes are my life.”

— Samuel Beckett

44. “Do we mean love, when we say love?”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

46. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

48. “The essential doesn’t change.”

— Samuel Beckett

49. “Estragon: I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett