Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To.”

— Samuel Beckett

302. “And if I have always behaved like a pig, the fault lies not with me but with my superiors, who corrected me only on points of detail instead of showing me the essence of the system...”

— Samuel Beckett

303. “I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes, my witless remains. Somewhere in this turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide of the mark. It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found. It too cannot be quiet. On others let it wreak its dying rage, and leave me in peace.”

— Samuel Beckett

304. “For why be discouraged, one of the thieves was saved, that is a generous percentage.”

— Samuel Beckett

305. “And but for the company of these little objects which I picked up here and there, when out walking, and which sometimes gave me the impression that they too needed me, I might have been reduced to the society of nice people or to the consolations of some religion or other, but I think not.”

— Samuel Beckett

306. “Alone he watched the sky go out, dark deepen to its full. He kept his eyes on the engulfed horizon, for he knew from experience what last throes it was capable of. And in the dark he could hear better too, he could hear the sounds the long day had kept from him, human murmurs for example, and the rain on the water.”

— Samuel Beckett

307. “But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.”

— Samuel Beckett

308. “Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white. Of void. Let her vanish. And the rest. For good.”

— Samuel Beckett

309. “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

310. “Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself.”

— Samuel Beckett

311. “I them, the master, myself, we are all innocent, enough. Innocent of what, no one knows, of wanting to know, wanting to be able, of all this noise about nothing, of this long sin against the silence that enfolds us, we wont ask any more, what it covers, this innocence we have fallen to, it covers everything, all faults, all questions, it puts an end to questions.”

— Samuel Beckett

312. “Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out.”

— Samuel Beckett

313. “Think of that! He removes his hat without misgiving, he unbuttons his coat and sits down, proffered all pure and open to the long joys of being himself, like a basin to a vomit.”

— Samuel Beckett

314. “Where you have nothing, there you should want nothing.”

— Samuel Beckett

315. “What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying. They don’t want that. Yes, there is more than one, apparently. But it’s always the same one that comes. You’ll do that later, he says.”

— Samuel Beckett

316. “They forget, they think they change and they never change, they’ll be there saying the same thing till they die, then perhaps a little silence, till the next gang arrives on the site.”

— Samuel Beckett

317. “For he who has once had to listen will listen always, whether he knows he will never hear anything again, or whether he does not. In other words, they like other words, no doubt about it, silence once broken will never again be whole.”

— Samuel Beckett

318. “I wandered in my mind, slowly, noting every detail of the labyrinth, its paths as familiar as those of my garden and yet ever new, as empty as the heart could wish or alive with strange encounters.”

— Samuel Beckett

319. “On. Stare on. Say on. Be on. Somehow on. Anyhow on. Till dim gone. At long last gone. All at long last gone.”

— Samuel Beckett

320. “All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability.”

— Samuel Beckett

321. “I did not know where to begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the matter.”

— Samuel Beckett

322. “Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.”

— Samuel Beckett

323. “The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.”

— Samuel Beckett

324. “And what I have, what I am, is enough, was always enough for me, and as far as my dear little sweet little future is concerned I have no qualms, I have a good time coming.”

— Samuel Beckett

325. “The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.”

— Samuel Beckett

326. “I was mad of course and still am, but harmless, I passed for harmless, that’s a good one. Not of course that I was really mad, just strange, a little strange, and with every passing year a little stranger, there can be few stranger creatures going about than me at the present day.”

— Samuel Beckett

327. “So to every man, soon or late, comes envy of the fly, with all the long joys of summer before it.”

— Samuel Beckett

328. “The end of a life is always vivifying.”

— Samuel Beckett

329. “Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.”

— Samuel Beckett

330. “This was indeed a merciful coincidence, was it not, that at the moment of Watt’s losing sight of the ground floor, he lost interest in it also.”

— Samuel Beckett

331. “It’s all a muddle in my head, graves and nuptials and the different varieties of motion.”

— Samuel Beckett

332. “The fear of falling is the source of many a folly. It is a disaster. I suppose the wisest thing now is to live it over again, meditate upon it and be edified. It is thus that man distinguishes himself from the ape and rises, from discovery to discovery, towards the light.”

— Samuel Beckett

333. “Enough to know no knowing.”

— Samuel Beckett

334. “I saw the mountain, impassible, cavernous, secret, where from morning to night I’d hear nothing but the wind, the curlews, the clink like distant silver of the stone-cutters’ hammers.”

— Samuel Beckett

335. “A instant of fraternity. But outside their explosions of violence this sentiment is as foreign to them as butterflies. And this owing not so much to want of heart or intelligence as to the ideal preying on one and all. So much for the inviolable zenith where for amateurs of myth lies hidden a way out to earth and sky.”

— Samuel Beckett

336. “It is so easy to accept, so easy to refuse, when the call is heard, so easy, so easy. But to us, in our windowlessness, in our bloodheat, in our hush, to us who could not hear the wind, nor see the sun, what call could come, from the kind of weather we liked, but a call so faint as to mock acceptance, mock refusal?”

— Samuel Beckett

337. “Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.”

— Samuel Beckett

338. “Adulterers, take warning, never admit.”

— Samuel Beckett

339. “Let there then be light, it will not necessarily be disastrous. Or let there be none, we’ll manage without it. But these lights, in the plural, which rear aloft, swell, sweep down and go out hissing, reminding one of the naja, perhaps the moment has come to throw them into the balance and have done with this tedious equipoise, at last.”

— Samuel Beckett

340. “I suppose we blathered.”

— Samuel Beckett

341. “The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.”

— Samuel Beckett

342. “After all this window is whatever I want it to be, up to a point, that’s right, don’t compromise yourself. What strikes me to begin with is how much rounder it is than it was, so that it looks like a bull’s-eye, or a porthole. No matter, provided there is something on the other side.”

— Samuel Beckett

343. “I weep without interruption. It’s an unbroken flow of words and tears. With no pause for reflection. But I speak softer, every year a little softer. Perhaps. Slower too, every year a little slower. Perhaps. it is hard for me to judge. If so the pauses would be longer, between the words, the sentences, the syllables, the tears, I confuse them, the words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth.”

— Samuel Beckett

344. “There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.”

— Samuel Beckett

345. “We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arsehole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen door.”

— Samuel Beckett

346. “She had at least the anagram of a good face.”

— Samuel Beckett

347. “The sound I liked best had nothing noble about it. It was the barking of the dogs, at night, in the clusters of hovels up in the hills, where the stone-cutters lived, like generations of stone-cutters before them. it came down to me where I lay, in the house in the plain, wild and soft, at the limit of earshot, soon weary. The dogs of the valley replied with their gross bay all fangs and jaws and foam...”

— Samuel Beckett

348. “That movements of an extreme complexity were taking place seemed certain, and yet what a simple thing it seemed, that vast yellow light sailing slowly behind my bars and which little by little the dense wall devoured, and finally eclipsed. And now its tranquil course was written on the walls, a radiance scored with shadow, then a brief quivering of leaves, if they were leaves, then that too went out, leaving me in the dark. How.”

— Samuel Beckett

349. “Yes, my resolutions were remarkable in this, that they were no sooner formed than something always happened to prevent their execution. That.”

— Samuel Beckett

350. “Yes it sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger. Then I see the sky different from what it is and the earth too takes on false colours. It looks like rest, it is not, I vanish happy in that alien light, which must have once been mine, I am willing to believe it, then the anguish of return, I won’t say where, I can’t, to absence perhaps, you must return, that’s all I know, it’s misery to stay, misery to go.”

— Samuel Beckett