"Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear."
Read quote
7 likes
Quote collection
Samuel Beckett quotes (page 11 of 16)
319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased."
Read quote
7 likes
"[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary."
Read quote
7 likes
"Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle."
Read quote
7 likes
"I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?"
Read quote
7 likes
"Where you have nothing, there you should want nothing."
Read quote
7 likes
"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."
Read quote
7 likes
"If I was dead, I wouldn't know I was dead. That's the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death."
Read quote
7 likes
"The day you die is just like any other, only shorter."
Read quote
7 likes
"Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits."
Read quote
6 likes
"To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?"
Read quote
6 likes
"All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante."
Read quote
6 likes
"The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again."
Read quote
6 likes
"There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place."
Read quote
6 likes
"The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed."
Read quote
6 likes
"No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found."
Read quote
6 likes
"Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience."
Read quote
6 likes
"The only thing you must never speak of is your happiness."
Read quote
6 likes
"And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric."
Read quote
6 likes
"it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one"
Read quote
6 likes