Samuel Beckett Quotes

The victims of ennui paralyze all the grosser feelings by excess, and torpify all the finer by disuse and inactivity. Disgusted with this world, and indifferent about another, they at last lay violent hands upon themselves, and assume no small credit for the sang froid with which they meet death. But, alas! such beings can scarcely be said to die, for they have never truly lived.

I hope I don't just sit around moping for two years.

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

To be bored to death is a form of suicide.

Sitting on a cornflake, Waiting for the van to come...

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

There is nothing so insupportable to man as to be in entire repose, without passion, occupation, amusement, or application. Then it is that he feels his own nothingness, isolation, insignificance, dependent nature, powerless, emptiness. Immediately there issue from his soul ennui, sadness, chagrin, vexation, despair.

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of use weren’t even doing little things. We were vegetables.

And I am bored to death with it. Bored to death with this place, bored to death with my life, bored to death with myself.

Boredom makes me sleepy or restless.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

How does one get bored of life?

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

How do you dare to ask me for a solution? It's like asking Seneca for a solution. You remember what he did? He committed suicide!

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

If I'm not doing anything, I get really antsy and bored.

War for most men is not fighting or marching in parades. It is sitting around somewhere wondering what the hell you are supposed to be doing.

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.

I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.

So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.

I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies.