top of page

"ESTRAGON: Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!VLADIMIR: Did I ever leave you?ESTRAGON: You let me go."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Existentialism quotes

"One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other."

"The only true borders lie between day and night, between life and death, between hope and loss."

"He had become the sky around the sun " alive, but not really there."

"We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad."

"That's the existential problem," Fat said, "based on the concept that We are what we do, rather than, We are what we think. It finds its first expression in Goethe's Faust, Part One, where Faust says, 'Im Anfang war das Wort'. He's quoting the opening of the Fourth Gospel; 'In the beginning was the Word.' Faust says, 'Nein. Im Anfang war die Tat.' In the beginning was the Deed. From this, all existentialism comes."

"Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?"

"Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees."

"And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit " next to the big bed " the involuntary effort of being."

"About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times."

"The flowing river nonchalantly reminds us of life: flowing relentlessly, flowing purposelessly. Life without purpose."
Explore more quotes by Samuel Beckett


"Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of."


"My mother. I don't think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers."


"But there are not two laws, that was the next thing I thought I understood, not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but one only to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all, I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers."


"Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence."


"Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn't tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That's what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all?"


"The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."


"There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough."


"James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."
bottom of page