Samuel Beckett Quotes

You are in the back of your head somewhere and you want to close your eyes and go away.

When I woke the next morning in my room at White's Motel, I showered and stood naked in front of the mirror, watching myself solemnly brush my teeth. I tried to feel something like excitement but came up only with a morose unease. Every now and then I could see myself-truly see myself-and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was 'the woman with the hole in her heart'. That was me.

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself

A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.

Sometimes there is no darker place than our thoughts, the moonless midnight of the mind.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

Everybody has a story... and a scream.

Madame Bovary is myself.

Every faculty and virtue I possess can be used as an instrument with which to worry myself.

True it is that each of us has only one life - but how many of us 'die a thousand deaths' in fear and nervousness!

Like Jesus, every human being has enough memories in his past to occupy his time and thoughts continually. It is not the remembrance of these incidents but the reliving of them that creates havoc in our souls.

Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.

Let a prince be guarded with soldiers, attended by councillors, and shut up in forts; yet if his thoughts disturb him, he is miserable.

The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.

Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself.

They flank me - depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don't need to show their badges. I know these guys very well. ... Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that.

Pain - physical, emotional and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed or "fixed." Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret.

World of words lost on the living / I take my place with the walking dead / Robbed of my voice I'm always giving / Thousands of words to this nameless dread.

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.