Samuel Beckett Quotes

236 Sourced Quotes

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

Samuel Beckett
The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust

Samuel Beckett
How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?

Samuel Beckett
I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - (pause) - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me in.

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

Samuel Beckett
In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe.

Samuel Beckett
When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.

Samuel Beckett
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.

Samuel Beckett
I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.

Samuel Beckett
Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praisefrom your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before.

Samuel Beckett
My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.

Samuel Beckett
Let us do something, while we have the chance!... Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

Samuel Beckett
It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.

Samuel Beckett
Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.

Samuel Beckett
Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever.

Samuel Beckett
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.

Samuel Beckett
The patients seeing so much of the nurses and so little of the doctor, it was natural that they should regard the former as their persecutors and the latter as their savior.

Samuel Beckett
If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the "Naught is more real..." and the "Ubi nihil vales..." both already in Murphy and neither very rational.

Samuel Beckett
Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most

Samuel Beckett
I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.

Samuel Beckett
Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.

Samuel Beckett
I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?

Samuel Beckett
Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.

Samuel Beckett
Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?

Samuel Beckett
In reality we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure

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

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