Samuel Beckett Quotes

A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.

There are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream.

I think reality is over-rated

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

The reality is more excellent than the report.

Things are as bad and as good as they seem. There's no need to add anything extra.

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.

Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.

Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.

Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.

The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.

I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better - time, consciousness and the dream-like basis of reality.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

...reality is always plural and mutable.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

We confuse ourselves with space-time events, when in fact we are the ones who generate these space-time events.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.