Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “ESTRAGON: Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer.”

— Samuel Beckett

302. “So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.”

— Samuel Beckett

303. “I wait for us perhaps to come back and we don’t come back for the evening perhaps to whisper to me what the morning had sung and that day to that morning no evening.”

— Samuel Beckett

304. “But is it enough, that’s what tortures me, is it enough?”

— Samuel Beckett

305. “But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget.”

— Samuel Beckett

306. “I used not to know where I was going, but I knew I would arrive, I knew there would be an end to the long blind road.”

— Samuel Beckett

307. “That passed the time. ESTRAGON: It would have passed in any case.”

— Samuel Beckett

308. “He had a curious hunted walk, like that of a destitute diabetic in a strange city.”

— Samuel Beckett

309. “POZZO: He speaks to me again! If this goes on much longer we’ll soon be old friends.”

— Samuel Beckett

310. “By all means, nothing simpler. It’s the natural order.”

— Samuel Beckett

311. “A peristalsis of light, worming its way into the dark.”

— Samuel Beckett

312. “Soon his body was quiet.”

— Samuel Beckett

313. “He who has waited long enough will wait forever.”

— Samuel Beckett

314. “But to-morrow I won’t remember having met anyone to-day. So don’t count on me to enlighten you.”

— Samuel Beckett

315. “Personally I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.”

— Samuel Beckett

316. “That is why nothing appears, all is silent, one is frightened to be born, no, one wishes one were, so as to begin to die.”

— Samuel Beckett

317. “We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.”

— Samuel Beckett

318. “That’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.”

— Samuel Beckett

319. “Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.”

— Samuel Beckett

320. “Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed... To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! 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

321. “The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.”

— Samuel Beckett

322. “And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.”

— Samuel Beckett

323. “One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second.”

— Samuel Beckett

324. “I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.”

— Samuel Beckett

325. “We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.”

— Samuel Beckett

326. “That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.”

— Samuel Beckett

327. “Yes, I dont know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

329. “Women are all the bloody sameyou can’t love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.”

— Samuel Beckett

330. “Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede.”

— Samuel Beckett

331. “Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.”

— Samuel Beckett

332. “Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.”

— Samuel Beckett

333. “The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.”

— Samuel Beckett

334. “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

335. “Lick your neighbor as yourself!”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

337. “Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

350. “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