Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The essential doesn’t change.”

— 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. “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

54. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

56. “Habit is a great deadener.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

58. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

60. “Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better.”

— Samuel Beckett

61. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

65. “Love requited is a short circuit.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

68. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

76. “What is that unforgettable line?”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

83. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

86. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

91. “Better hope deferred than none.”

— Samuel Beckett

92. “Will night never come?”

— Samuel Beckett

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— 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