Samuel Beckett
I can't go on. I'll go on.Collection: Moving
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.Collection: Motivational
Words are all we have.Collection: Communication
Birth was the death of him.Collection: Death
We are all born mad. Some remain so.Collection: Funny
No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.Collection: Business
Habit is a great deadener.Collection: Great
If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.Collection: Love
What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.Collection: Funny
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.Collection: Intelligence
You're on earth. There's no cure for that.
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
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.
Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Do we mean love, when we say love?
I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
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.
Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.
In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.
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.
I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.
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.
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.
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.
If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.Collection: Silence
The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.Collection: World
The day you die is just like any other, only shorter.Collection: Dies
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.Collection: Believe
Words are the clothes thoughts wear.Collection: Clothes
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.Collection: Years
Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.Collection: Life
Nothing is more real than nothing.Collection: Real
Imagination at wit's end spreads its sad wings.Collection: Sad
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.Collection: Able
What was God doing with himself before the creation?Collection: Creation
We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: Self
Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.Collection: Charity
Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.Collection: Waiting
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.Collection: Goes On
Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.Collection: Eye