Samuel Beckett
All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.Collection: Waiting For Godot
People are bloody ignorant apes.Collection: People
The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgustCollection: Tolerance
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.Collection: Want
That's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.Collection: Mistake
To restore silence is the role of objects.Collection: Silence
Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.Collection: Reality
There's never an end for the sea.Collection: Sea
There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Memories
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.Collection: Alternatives
Better hope deferred than none.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Knowing
Two in distressmake sorrow less.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Rain
Words fail, there are times when even they fail.Collection: Time
My mistakes are my life.Collection: Mistake
Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!Collection: Waiting For Godot
Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.Collection: People
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?Collection: Love
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!Collection: Too Late
All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Running
The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.Collection: Bears
Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful.Collection: Taken
With all this darkness round me I feel less alone.Collection: Darkness
What is that unforgettable line?Collection: Lines
It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.Collection: Expression
Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.Collection: Silence
Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.Collection: Silence
To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.Collection: Filth
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.Collection: Thinking
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.Collection: Memories
Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.Collection: Smile
Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.Collection: Perception
Do you always believe in the life to come? Mine was always that.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Art
The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.Collection: Reality
It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.Collection: Long
Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.Collection: Compromise
I gave up before birth.Collection: Birth
Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.Collection: Believe
I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.Collection: Records
But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.Collection: Thinking
Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place...that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.Collection: Girl
If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.Collection: Godot
My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.Collection: Art
But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other, (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity.)Collection: Hands