Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better.”

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

106. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

109. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

111. “Estragon: Nothing to be done.”

— Samuel Beckett

112. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

118. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

124. “To restore silence is the role of objects.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

126. “If you don’t know where you are currently standing, you’re dead.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

128. “It was the only way to progress, to stop.”

— Samuel Beckett

129. “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

130. “Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.”

— Samuel Beckett

131. “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

132. “So all things limp together for the only possible.”

— Samuel Beckett

133. “You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.”

— Samuel Beckett

134. “To know you can do better next time, unrecognizably better, and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing there is not, there is a thought to be going on with.”

— Samuel Beckett

135. “Constipation is a sign of good health in pomeranians.”

— Samuel Beckett

136. “Watt’s concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.”

— Samuel Beckett

137. “All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.”

— Samuel Beckett

138. “The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

140. “Mysterious affair, electricity.”

— Samuel Beckett

141. “It is by the nadir that we come, said Watt, and it is by the nadir that we go, whatever that means. And the artist must have felt something of this kind too, for the circle did not turn, as circles will, but sailed steadfast in its white skies, with its patient breach for ever below.”

— Samuel Beckett

142. “The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

144. “Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.”

— Samuel Beckett

145. “Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity.”

— Samuel Beckett

146. “Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.”

— Samuel Beckett

147. “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

149. “At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.”

— Samuel Beckett

150. “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