Samuel Beckett Quotes

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come

My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this—that life is without a meaning.

According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.

As a kid, I loved 'Godot' because of the poetry and the humor and the strangeness, but then as you get older, it's much more resonant.

I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.

The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty.... I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working.... Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

"Wait and see" is no easier now than it was as a child.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

Since I came at 'Godot' from a God-based frame of mind, it didn't strike me as absurdist. It struck me as characters waiting for proof of God's existence.

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.