Best 334 quotes of Samuel Beckett on MyQuotes

The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesitates) ...me. (Pause.)

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

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

There is man in his entirety, blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.

There is this to be said for Dachsunds of such length and lowness as Nelly, that it makes very little difference to their appearance whether they stand, sit or lie.

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.

There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.

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

The short winter’s day was drawing to a close. It seems to me sometimes that these are the only days I have ever known, and especially that most charming moment of all, just before night wipes them out.

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.

The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.

[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.

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.

The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.

The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.

The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.

The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

To find a form that accommodates the shape of the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go.

To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.

To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?

To restore silence is the role of objects.

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

To what will love not stoop!

Try again. Fail again. Try better.

Two in distressmake sorrow less.

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.

Unhappy, but not unhappy enough.

Vladimir: I don't understand. Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you? Vladimir uses his intelligence. Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.

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.

Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.

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.

We all are born mad. Some remain so.

We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.

We are all born; some remain so.

We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

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

We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.

We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.

We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench

We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness!

What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity. A pity I should have to give tongue at the same time, it prevents it from bleeding in peace, licking the lips.

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come