Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

104. “Hamm: There’s something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.”

— Samuel Beckett

105. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

106. “Another happy day.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

108. “We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?”

— Samuel Beckett

109. “Two in distressmake sorrow less.”

— Samuel Beckett

110. “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”

— Samuel Beckett

111. “Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.”

— Samuel Beckett

112. “I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of – how shall I say, I don’t know.”

— Samuel Beckett

113. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

114. “If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.”

— Samuel Beckett

115. “Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.”

— Samuel Beckett

116. “I didn’t understand women at that period. I still don’t for that matter. Nor men either. Nor animals either. What I understand best, which is not saying much, are my pains.”

— Samuel Beckett

117. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Samuel Beckett

119. “To what will love not stoop!”

— Samuel Beckett

120. “I have spoken softly, gone my ways softly, all my days, as behoves one who has nothing to say, nowhere to go, and so nothing to gain by being seen or heard.”

— Samuel Beckett

121. “Here all is strange.”

— Samuel Beckett

122. “The turmoil of the day freezes in a thousand absurd postures.”

— Samuel Beckett

123. “ESTRAGON: Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer.”

— Samuel Beckett

124. “On the other hand it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes.”

— Samuel Beckett

125. “If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.”

— Samuel Beckett

126. “Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most.”

— Samuel Beckett

127. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

128. “In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.”

— Samuel Beckett

129. “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?”

— Samuel Beckett

130. “There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.”

— Samuel Beckett

131. “You cried for night – it falls. Now cry in darkness.”

— Samuel Beckett

132. “Estragon: Nothing to be done.”

— Samuel Beckett

133. “We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

136. “Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.”

— Samuel Beckett

137. “Does it really matter which hand is employed to absterge the podex?”

— Samuel Beckett

138. “The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.”

— Samuel Beckett

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

139. “To have been always what I am – and so changed from what I was.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

141. “Light black. From pole to pole.”

— Samuel Beckett

142. “Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.”

— Samuel Beckett

143. “I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.”

— Samuel Beckett

144. “In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.”

— Samuel Beckett

145. “How difficult it is to speak of the moon and not lose one’s head, the witless moon.”

— Samuel Beckett

146. “I take no sides. I am interested in the shape of ideas. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine: “Do not despair; one the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.” That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.”

— Samuel Beckett

147. “It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.”

— Samuel Beckett

148. “Art has always been this – pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric – whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.”

— Samuel Beckett

149. “The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”

— Samuel Beckett

150. “There’s no lack of void.”

— Samuel Beckett