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Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.

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
Concerned
Inanimate
Poet
Antithesis
Poetry
Metaphysics
Feeling
Cultivate
Perfect
Essentially
Universals
Spiritual
Philosophical
Animates
Feelings
Senses
Purge
Mind
Passionate
Particulars

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

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I don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.
Samuel Beckett
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Adulterers, take warning, never admit.
Samuel Beckett
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Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!
Samuel Beckett
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Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.
Samuel Beckett
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Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.
Samuel Beckett
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I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.
Samuel Beckett
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How long have I been here, what a question, I've often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary.
Samuel Beckett
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The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.
Samuel Beckett
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The only sin is the sin of being born.
Samuel Beckett
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What are we doing here, that is the question.
Samuel Beckett
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They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Samuel Beckett
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The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.
Samuel Beckett
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To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
Samuel Beckett
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And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.
Samuel Beckett
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Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.
Samuel Beckett
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God is love. Yes or no? No.
Samuel Beckett
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To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?
Samuel Beckett
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Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.
Samuel Beckett
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Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.
Samuel Beckett
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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.
Samuel Beckett