Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.”

— Samuel Beckett

152. “Was I asleep? Had I slept?”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

154. “There’s no lack of void.”

— Samuel Beckett

155. “Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.”

— Samuel Beckett

156. “Hell must be like... reminiscing about the good old days when we wished we were dead.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

159. “With all this darkness round me I feel less alone.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

163. “Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.”

— Samuel Beckett

164. “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

165. “Weary with my weariness, white last moon, sole regret, not even. To be dead, before her, on her, with her, and turn, dead on dead, about poor mankind, and never have to die anymore, from among the living. Not even, not even that. My moon was here below, far below, the little I was able to desire. And one day, soon, soon, one earthlit night, beneath the earth, a dying being will say, like me, in the earthlight, Not even, not even that, and die, without having been able to find regret.”

— Samuel Beckett

166. “I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. ‘Nothing is more real than nothing.’ They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.”

— Samuel Beckett

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167. “Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.”

— Samuel Beckett

168. “To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.”

— Samuel Beckett

169. “Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.”

— Samuel Beckett

170. “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

171. “In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

173. “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

174. “And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks look all alike.”

— Samuel Beckett

175. “I say to myself – sometimes, Clov, you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you – one day. I say to myself – sometimes, Clov, you must be better than that if you want them to let you go – one day. But I feel too old, and too far, to form new habits. Good, it’ll never end, I’ll never go.”

— Samuel Beckett

176. “I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?”

— Samuel Beckett

177. “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

178. “What was God doing with himself before the creation?”

— Samuel Beckett

179. “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

180. “I say me, knowing all the while it’s not me.”

— Samuel Beckett

181. “So it is with time, that lightens what is dark, that darkens what is light.”

— Samuel Beckett

182. “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

183. “Morning is the time to hide. They wake up, hale and hearty, their tongues hanging out for order, beauty and justice, baying for their due. Yes, from eight or nine till noon is the dangerous time. But towards noon things quiet down, the most implacable are sated, they go home, it might have been better but they’ve done a good job, there have been a few survivors but they’ll give no more trouble, each man counts his rats.”

— Samuel Beckett

184. “I gave up before birth.”

— Samuel Beckett

185. “Birth was the death of him.”

— Samuel Beckett

186. “The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.”

— Samuel Beckett

187. “Mysterious affair, electricity.”

— Samuel Beckett

188. “And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.”

— Samuel Beckett

189. “Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.”

— Samuel Beckett

190. “Yes, now I remember, yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That’s been going on now for half a century.”

— Samuel Beckett

191. “It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

193. “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

194. “All has not been said and never will be.”

— Samuel Beckett

195. “Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.”

— Samuel Beckett

196. “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

197. “I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

199. “I’ll make myself a memory, I have only to listen, the voice will tell me everything, tell it to me again, everything I need, in dribs and drabs, breathless, it’s like a confession, a last confession, you think it’s finished, then it starts off again, there were so many sins, the memory is so bad, the words don’t come, the words fail, the breath fails...”

— Samuel Beckett

200. “It’s a rare thing not to have been bonny – once.”

— Samuel Beckett