Quotes from Samuel Beckett

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.

The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.

I have always been amazed at my contemporaries' lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.

Better hope deferred than none.

Estragon: I can't go on like this. Vladimir: That's what you think.

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?

The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.

We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.

Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?

If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.

God is a witness that cannot be sworn.

I don't like animals. It's a strange thing, I don't like men and I don't like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.

I had little talent for happiness.

The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

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.

Imagination at wit's end spreads its sad wings.

I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.