Samuel Beckett Quotes: 18

• If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.

• We are all born mad. Some remain so.

• You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.

• The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

  Waiting for Godot

• Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

• I can't go on, I'll go on.

  I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

• The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

  Endgame

• The only sin is the sin of being born

• No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

• 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.

• To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.

  Waiting for Godot

• Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

• Spend the years of learning squanderingCourage for the years of wanderingThrough a world politely turningFrom the loutishness of learning.

  Collected Poems in English and French

• Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea.

  Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

• It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

  All That Fall and Other Plays for Radio and Screen. by Samuel Beckett

• In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

  Collected Poems in English and French

• Ada: And why life? (Pause.) Why life, Henry? (Pause.) Is there anyone about?Henry: Not a living soul.Ada: I thought as much. (Pause.) When we longed to have it to ourselves there was always someone. Now that it does not matter the place is deserted.

  Embers

• You must go on.I can’t go on.I’ll go on.

  The Unnamable