Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.”

— Samuel Beckett

202. “From things about to disappear I turn away in time. To watch them out of sight, no, I can’t do it.”

— Samuel Beckett

203. “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

204. “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

205. “Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away.”

— Samuel Beckett

206. “In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg. Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

208. “I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.”

— Samuel Beckett

209. “What to do now, what shall I do now, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later. Generally speaking. There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless. I should mention before going any further that I say aporia without knowing what it means. Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares? I don’t know.”

— Samuel Beckett

210. “Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything. The horror-worn eyes linger abject on all they have beseeched so long, in a last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for nothing.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

212. “Do you always believe in the life to come? Mine was always that.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

214. “Birth was the death of him.”

— Samuel Beckett

215. “And Watt preferred on the whole having to do with things of which he did not know the name, though this too was painful to Watt, to having to do with things of which the known name, the proven name, was not the name, any more, for him. For he could always hope, of a thing of which he had never known the name, that he would learn the name, some day, and so be tranquilized.”

— Samuel Beckett

216. “V: After having sucked all the good out of him you duck him away like a... like a banana skin.”

— Samuel Beckett

217. “I gave up before birth.”

— Samuel Beckett

218. “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

219. “The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.”

— Samuel Beckett

220. “Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was, forgot to be.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

222. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

224. “Is there then no hope? Good gracious, no, heavens, what an idea! Just a faint one perhaps, but which will never serve. But one forgets.”

— Samuel Beckett

225. “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

226. “The irony of life! Of life in love! That he who has the time should lack the force, that she who has the force should lack the time! That a trifling and in all probability tractable obstruction of some endocrinal Bandusia, that a mere matter of forty-five or fifty minutes by the clock, should as effectively as death itself, or as the Hellespont, separate lovers.”

— Samuel Beckett

227. “I have changed refuge so often, in the course of my rout, that now I can’t tell between dens and ruins. But there was never any city but the one. It is true you often move along in a dream, houses and factories darken the air, trams go by and under your feet wet from the grass there are suddenly cobbles. I only know the city of my childhood, I must have seen the other, but unbelieving. All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing.”

— Samuel Beckett

228. “All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.”

— Samuel Beckett

229. “A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.”

— Samuel Beckett

230. “I feel the old dark gathering, the solitude preparing, by which I know myself, and the call of that ignorance which might be noble and is mere poltroonery.”

— Samuel Beckett

231. “What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.”

— Samuel Beckett

232. “All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.”

— Samuel Beckett

233. “We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.”

— Samuel Beckett

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

238. “I was sorry he had not a cat, or a young dog, or better still, an old dog. But all he had to offer in the way of dumb companions was a pink and grey parrot. He used to try and teach it to say, Nihil in intellectu, etc. These first three words the bird managed well enough, but the celebrated restriction was too much for it, all you heard was a series of squawks.”

— Samuel Beckett

239. “So I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended. But it was nothing, mere speechlessness due to long silence, as in the wood that darkens the mouth of hell, do you remember, I only just.”

— Samuel Beckett

240. “For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

242. “But now he knows these hills, that is to say he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them from afar it will be I think with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath, all that too quite differently disposed.”

— Samuel Beckett

243. “That is what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by... hardly a day, without some addition to one’s knowledge however trifling, the addition I mean, provided one takes the pains.”

— Samuel Beckett

244. “When the fool supports the knave, the good man may fold his hands. The fool in league with the knave against himself is a combination that none may withstand. Oh, monster of humanity and enlightenment, despairing of a world in which the only natural allies are the fools and knaves, a mankind sterile with self-complicity.”

— Samuel Beckett

245. “The scream of No’s knife in Yes’s wound.”

— Samuel Beckett

246. “What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?”

— Samuel Beckett

247. “Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.”

— Samuel Beckett

248. “How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I’d been saving up for her all my life.”

— Samuel Beckett

249. “What is more true than anything else? To swim is true and to sink is true. One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak onlyof the mess.”

— Samuel Beckett

250. “The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never.”

— Samuel Beckett