Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

353. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

355. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “We live on earth and there is no cure.”

— Samuel Beckett

367. “The corner in which he sat was curtained off from the sun, the poor old sun in the Virgin for the billionth time.”

— Samuel Beckett

368. “But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.”

— Samuel Beckett

369. “But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.”

— Samuel Beckett

370. “I shall be neutral and inert. No difficulty there. Throes are the only trouble, I must be on my guard against throes. But I am less given to them now, since coming here.”

— Samuel Beckett

371. “Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.”

— Samuel Beckett

372. “Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen.”

— Samuel Beckett

373. “My keepers, why keepers, I’m in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it’s to make me think I’m a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away.”

— Samuel Beckett

374. “All roads were right for me, a wrong road was an event, for me.”

— Samuel Beckett

375. “As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.”

— Samuel Beckett

376. “What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required.”

— Samuel Beckett

377. “The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.”

— Samuel Beckett

378. “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

379. “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

380. “They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.”

— Samuel Beckett

381. “Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.”

— Samuel Beckett

382. “Having oscillated all his life between the torments of a superficial loitering and the horrors of disinterested endeavour, he finds himself at last in a situation where to do nothing exclusively would be an act of the highest value, and significance.”

— Samuel Beckett

383. “I am interested in the shape of ideas, even if I do not believe in them.”

— Samuel Beckett

384. “What am I doing now, I’m trying to see where I am, so as to be able to go elsewhere, should occasion arise, or else simply to say, You have merely to wait till they come and fetch you, that’s my impression at times.”

— Samuel Beckett

385. “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

386. “Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z. Or say for verisimilitude the Balloygan Road. That dear old back road. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road in lieu of nowhere in particular. Where no truck anymore. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road on the way from A to Z.”

— Samuel Beckett

387. “Who knows what dirty story, what even better dirty story, it may even be one we have not heard before, told at some colossal pitch of pure smut, beats at this moment in vain against our eardrums.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

389. “The one outside of life we always were in the end, all our long vain life long. Who is not spared by the mad need to speak, to think, to know where one is, where one was, during the wild dream, up above, under the skies, venturing forth at night. The one ignorant of himself and silent, ignorant of his silence and silent, who could not be and gave up trying. Who crouches in their midst who see themselves in him and in their eyes stares his unchanging stare.”

— Samuel Beckett

390. “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

391. “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

392. “An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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