Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both French and English. This Samuel Beckett quotes will motivate you.
Best Samuel Beckett Quotes
- “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Words are the clothes thoughts wear.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Nothing is more real than nothing.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Better hope deferred than none.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either.” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “All has not been said and never will be.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “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
- “My mistakes are my life.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “All life long, the same questions, the same answers.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “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
- “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“What do we do now, now that we are happy?” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying. I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “To have been always what I am – and so changed from what I was.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “What are we doing here, that is the question.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “If you don’t know where you are currently standing, you’re dead.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “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.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “With all this darkness round me I feel less alone.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “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
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“We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “I am still alive then. That may come in useful.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “I had little talent for happiness.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “People are bloody ignorant apes.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “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.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “To restore silence is the role of objects.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Mysterious affair, electricity.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “There’s never an end for the sea.” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“Birth was the death of him.” ~ 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
- “It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.” ~ Samuel Beckett Quotes
- “What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Fail, fail again, fail better.” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “It’s so nice to know where you’re going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.” ~ Samuel Beckett
- “Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.” ~ Samuel Beckett
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“Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.” ~ 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
- “I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine . . . “Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned.” That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.” ~ Samuel Beckett
