Quotes by Samuel Beckett

About Samuel Beckett:

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.

Samuel Beckett

que ferais-je sans ce monde que ferais-je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions où être ne dure qu'un instant où chaque instant verse dans le vide dans l'oubli d'avoir été sans cette onde où à la fin corps et ombre ensemble s'engloutissent ...

Samuel Beckett

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

Samuel Beckett

It is a building designed by committee: all they have been able to agree on is that it should be rectangular, have windows, and not fall over.

Samuel Beckett

Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies. I don’t understand these things.

Samuel Beckett

There are stories — legends, really — of the “steady job.” Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job was for life, not just for the business c...

Samuel Beckett

In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.

Samuel Beckett

Verstehst du, im Grunde sind doch die Mitarbeiter das Problem. Du zahlst, wenn du sie einstellst, du zahlst, wenn du sie rausschmeißt, und dazwischen muss du sie auch noch bezahlen.

Samuel Beckett

There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.

Samuel Beckett

Warum wollen sie unbedingt, dass ich den Auftrag storniere?' Der Mann klingt auf einmal misstrauisch. 'Seid ihr überbucht?' 'Ich will Ihnen nur helfen. Wirklich, unsere Kurse sind grottenschlecht. Es ist immer die gleiche Teamwork-Botschaft, nur unt...

Samuel Beckett

Du weißt doch noch, die Leute beschweren sich immer beim Management, dass ihre Work-Life-Balance nicht mehr stimmt. Also, am nächsten Montag haben sie eine Personalversammlung zu diesem Thema angesetzt. Um acht Uhr früh.

Samuel Beckett

That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did.

Samuel Beckett

there is [...] a last even of last times of saying if you do not love me I shall not be loved if I do not love you I shall not love

Samuel Beckett

No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our...

Samuel Beckett

It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps in through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter. No one is strong enough or cunning enough to avert by word or deed the misfortune that is rooted in the iron laws of ...

Samuel Beckett

You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain.

Samuel Beckett

She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears somethi...

Samuel Beckett

Friendship is no ideal state of mind; it is a law, and a strict one, on which the entire legal systems of great cultures were built. It reaches beyond personal desires and self-regard in men's hearts, its grip is greater than that of sexual desire, a...

Samuel Beckett

Evidently one endures anything, provided one has a goal.

Samuel Beckett

And yet, sometimes facts are no more than pitiful consequences, because guilt does not reside in our acts but in the intentions that give rise to our act. Everything turns on our intentions.

Samuel Beckett

Then I understood that a survivor has no right to bring a complaint. Whoever survives has won his case, he has no right and no cause to bring charges; he has emerged the stronger, the more cunning, the more obstinate, from the struggle.

Samuel Beckett

Author Bio

  • NameSamuel Beckett
  • DescriptionIrish novelist, playwright, and poet
  • AliasesSamuel Barclay Beckett; Andrew Belis
  • BornApril 13, 1906
  • DiedDecember 22, 1989
  • CountryIreland
  • ProfessionWriter; Linguist; Film Director; Screenwriter; Cricketer; Poet; Novelist; Playwright; Translator; Artist
  • WorksMurphy; Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable; Waiting For Godot; Watt; Endgame; Krapp's Last Tape; How It Is
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature