The Irish avant-garde playwright, poet, and critic Samuel Beckett was almost single-handedly responsible for a sea change in contemporary theater in the 50s and 60s with his play “Waiting for Godot”. Here are some of Beckett’s most memorable quotes.
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.
Birth was the death of him.
Do we mean love, when we say love?
I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.
Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.
Habit is a great deadener.
I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile… a stain upon the silence.
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.
I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.
The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?
What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
Words are all we have.
You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.
I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.
If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.
In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.
It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.
James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.
Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
Let me go to hell, that’s all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.
No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.