Samuel Beckett Quotes

236 Sourced Quotes

What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vise versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors.

Samuel Beckett
What sky! What light! Ah in spite of all it is a blessed thing to be alive in such weather, and out of hospital.

Samuel Beckett
All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

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

Samuel Beckett
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
The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.

Samuel Beckett
You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.

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

Samuel Beckett
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
If I was dead, I wouldn't know I was dead. That's the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

Samuel Beckett
My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.

Samuel Beckett
The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).

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

Samuel Beckett
Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.

Samuel Beckett
Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.

Samuel Beckett
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

Samuel Beckett
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.

Samuel Beckett
Do not despair. Remember there is no triangle, however obtuse, but the circumference of some circle passes through its wretched vertices.

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

Samuel Beckett
Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.

Samuel Beckett
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.

Samuel Beckett
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
Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.

Samuel Beckett
Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.

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

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

Samuel Beckett
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
Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.

Samuel Beckett