Samuel Beckett Quotes - Page 3

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.

Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.

Better hope deferred than none.

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.

Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.

Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

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.

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.

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.

Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

We all are born mad. Some remain so.

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.

All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.

The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

Make sense who may. I switch off.

It is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.

The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.