Samuel Beckett Quotes

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

Theology is anthropology.

For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.

I think we shape God in our own image a lot of the time.

Aside from theology and sex there is really nothing to talk about.

God said, "Let us make man in our image." Man said, 'Let us make God in our image.

In Philosophy, the contemplations of man do either penetrate unto God, or are circumferred to Nature, or are reflected and reverted upon himself. Out of which several inquiries there do arise three knowledges, Divine Philosophy, Natural Philosophy, and Human Philosophy or Humanity. For all things are marked and stamped with this triple character of the power of God, the difference of Nature and the use of Man.

In God alone, essence (what He is) and existence (that he is) coincide.

God only acts and is, in existing beings or men.

The god who presides over the Judeo-Christian belief system bears a disquieting resemblance to those imperfect creations known as human beings. This suggests that either he really did fashion us in his own image or we fashioned him in ours.

There's no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we've experienced God, not what or who God is.

As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd.

We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.

We can have no conception of God higher than man, so our God is man, and man is God.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

The whole universe is composed of name and form. Whatever we see is either a compound of name and form, or simply name with form which is a mental image.

Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.

There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.

What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words.

It is said that God has created man in his own image. But it may be that humankind has created God in the image of humankind.

We offer up prayers to god only because we have made him after our own image. We treat him like a pasha, or a sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

The average, vague understanding of being can be permeated by traditional theories and opinions about being in such a way that these theories, as the sources of the prevailing understanding, remain hidden.