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I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.

Samuel Beckett

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Samuel Beckett
Age: 83 †
Born: 1906
Born: April 13
Died: 1989
Died: December 22
Artist
Author
Cricketer
Film Director
French Resistance Fighter
Intellectual
Linguist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Teacher
Dublin city
Samuel Barclay Beckett
Andrew Belis
Sam Beckett
Sa-miao-erh Pei-kʻo-tʻe
Samuel Beḳeṭ
Always
Quest
Amazed
Lack
Mere
Whose
Morning
Finesse
Night
Contemporaries
Soul
Quests

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

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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?
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Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.
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The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.
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No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.
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Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.
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Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.
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I can't go on. I'll go on.
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The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.
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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' You won't believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
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Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.
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But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.
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There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.
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The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.
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All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability.
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Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.
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I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.
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It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.
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The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).
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Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.
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If you don't know where you are currently standing, you're dead.
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