Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

52. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

53. “Habit is a great deadener.”

— Samuel Beckett

54. “Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

56. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

57. “There is man in his entirety, blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.”

— Samuel Beckett

58. “I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.”

— Samuel Beckett

59. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

60. “Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

62. “Love requited is a short circuit.”

— Samuel Beckett

63. “The only sin is the sin of being born.”

— Samuel Beckett

64. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

65. “That’s what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.”

— Samuel Beckett

66. “That penny farthing hell you call your mind.”

— Samuel Beckett

67. “There’s never an end for the sea.”

— Samuel Beckett

68. “Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”

— Samuel Beckett

69. “How time flies when one has fun!”

— Samuel Beckett

70. “Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end.”

— Samuel Beckett

71. “Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.”

— Samuel Beckett

72. “Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.”

— Samuel Beckett

73. “Sloth is all passions the most powerful.”

— Samuel Beckett

74. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

75. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

76. “We spend our life, it’s ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.”

— Samuel Beckett

77. “What is that unforgettable line?”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

79. “Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.”

— Samuel Beckett

80. “Better hope deferred than none.”

— Samuel Beckett

81. “That double-headed monster of damnation and salvation – Time.”

— Samuel Beckett

82. “Words fail, there are times when even they fail.”

— Samuel Beckett

83. “Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!”

— Samuel Beckett

84. “God is a witness that cannot be sworn.”

— Samuel Beckett

85. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

— Samuel Beckett

86. “The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.”

— Samuel Beckett

87. “If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.”

— Samuel Beckett

88. “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

91. “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!”

— Samuel Beckett

92. “Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

94. “Will night never come?”

— Samuel Beckett

95. “Two in distressmake sorrow less.”

— Samuel Beckett

96. “My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don’t understand how it can be endured.”

— Samuel Beckett

97. “That is one of the many reasons why I avoid speaking as much as possible. For I always say either too much or too little, which is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine.”

— Samuel Beckett

98. “Dying for dark – the darker the worse. Strange.”

— Samuel Beckett

99. “The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett