"No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found"

Samuel Beckett’s words bristle with a characteristic existential weariness, entwined with dark wit and resignation. There is a bitterly ironic twist in the speaker’s assertion of having no regrets, only to immediately confess the singular regret of having been born at all. The phrase undermines the conventional sentimentality of regret; rather than fretting over past actions or missed opportunities, the regret is so vast and fundamental that it encompasses existence itself.

Such a declaration emerges from a philosophical tradition that interrogates the burdens of consciousness and the futility of human endeavor. The admission “all I regret is having been born” suggests that the entire tapestry of experience, with its sorrows and joys, is overshadowed by the original wound of being thrust into the world without choice. Birth becomes the primal cause of all subsequent suffering or disappointment. To regret only birth is to reject the value of everything life offers, a gesture of ultimate nihilism wrapped in a paradox: to recognize one’s regret is to participate in the reflective act that defines us as human, yet here that reflection leads only to negation.

Beckett’s second sentence, “dying is such a long tiresome business I always found,” delivers a further twist. Death, the presumed release from suffering, is not an event but a drawn-out ordeal, one that saps energy and persistently shadows life’s experience. The phrase “long tiresome business” conveys weariness with the protracted nature of mortality itself. Life, for Beckett’s speaker, is not a swift passage from beginning to end but an extended and fatiguing transition toward oblivion.

Together, these statements encapsulate the bleak humor and existential pessimism that pervade Beckett’s work. There is no melodramatic despair, only a matter-of-fact acknowledgment of the absurdity and exhaustion of being. Yet, in articulating this exhaustion, a subtle artistry emerges, one that allows for a deep, wry understanding, even a kinship, with the human condition.