Success Quote by Samuel Beckett

Beckett turns the self-help anthem inside out, then leaves it bleeding on the stage. "Ever tried. Ever failed". reads like a bureaucratic checklist of human effort, stripped of romance. The sentences are snapped into fragments, as if even grammar has lost the stamina for consolation. That staccato rhythm is the point: in Beckett, the pep talk collapses under the weight of repetition, and what survives is a kind of stubborn motion.

The intent isn’t to glorify grit; it’s to deflate the fantasy of progress. "No matter" works as a cold reset button, cancelling the moral bookkeeping we attach to success and failure. Then comes the wicked pivot: "Fail better". Beckett makes failure not the opposite of achievement but its most honest unit of measurement. "Better" doesn’t promise victory; it promises refinement in how we fall, a marginal increase in lucidity, maybe even a cleaner kind of despair.

Context matters here. Beckett, writing out of the wreckage of 20th-century Europe and the existential aftershocks of war, builds worlds where meaning doesn’t arrive on schedule. In works like Worstward Ho (where the line appears), the voice keeps pushing language forward even as it admits language is insufficient. The subtext is almost accusatory: you will keep trying, not because hope is rational, but because stopping is its own failure. Beckett offers no uplift, only a darkly comic ethic: persist, but drop the illusion that persistence will redeem you.