Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2025 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. “Hamm: There’s something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.”

— Samuel Beckett

104. “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

105. “Another happy day.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— 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. “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

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

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

— Samuel Beckett

118. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

125. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

128. “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

129. “Estragon: Nothing to be done.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

135. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

139. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

146. “My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

148. “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

149. “Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application.”

— Samuel Beckett

150. “I had little talent for happiness.”

— Samuel Beckett