Samuel Beckett Quotes

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

It is the gift of seeing the life around them clearly and vividly, as something that is exciting in its own right. It is an innate gift, varying in intensity with the individual's temperament and environment.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

Words are but pictures of our thoughts.

I was always drawing eyes, even as a child. Eyes fascinated me.

I like words. Words are places, rooms, distant airs, thin and tropical. They make us feel and imagine we are more than our bodies.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

Possibly because I earn my living as a writer of fiction and possibly because it's just the sensible thing to do, I like to pay attention to everything I come across, including things that evoke the uncanny or the mysterious.

I would say that my music is surreal, it's inspired by dreams, and it's inspired by heartbreak.

I think, as human beings, we all have a fundamental mode, a basic way of relating to the rest of reality, and for me, it's always instinctively been about sound making and trying to extract information, grammar, meaning from sound making. That's been my way of navigating reality that's very personal; a painter might say they make marks or look.

I love looking at pieces of art through the eyes of a child.

This rose became a bandanna, which became a house, which became infused with all passion, which became a hideaway, which became yes I would like to have dinner, which became hands, which became lands, shores, beaches, natives on the stones, staring and wild beasts in the trees, chasing the hats of lost hunters, and all this deserves a tone.

To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes