Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Beckett

"There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet"

Samuel Beckett, Playwright

About this Quote

Man, Beckett suggests, is a creature with an unshakeable talent for misplacing responsibility. The line lands like a shrug sharpened into a blade: we blame the boots because admitting the problem is our feet would mean admitting it’s us. It’s not just cowardice; it’s a whole psychological economy. Objects are convenient scapegoats because they can be swapped, repaired, discarded. Feet can’t. The joke has teeth because it’s so petty. We’re not talking about grand moral failures; we’re talking about the daily, almost comic reflex to externalize discomfort.

Beckett’s intent is less to scold than to expose a basic human coping mechanism: the need to believe that suffering is accidental, fixable, caused by the wrong equipment. That’s the subtext of modern life in miniature. If the boots are at fault, then the world remains intelligible, and you remain essentially competent. If it’s your feet, you’re stuck with a body and a self that don’t quite work, and that’s Beckett’s home terrain: the humiliations of embodiment, the mind’s elaborate evasions, the endless rehearsal of excuses while nothing changes.

The phrasing matters. “There’s man all over for you” sounds like an exhausted aside to the audience, a vaudeville setup that turns bleak. Beckett’s context is postwar disillusion and existential comedy: characters trapped in routines, inventing explanations to avoid the larger void. The boots-and-feet image distills his worldview into a single, perfectly banal tragedy.

Quote Details

Topic	Witty One-Liners
Source	Verified source: En attendant Godot (Samuel Beckett, 1952) Text match: 95.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: Here is the whole man, attacking his shoe when it is his foot that is guilty. Primary-source origin: the line is from Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. Beckett wrote the play in French first and it was first published as En attendant Godot (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit) in 1952. Your English wording (“There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet”) corresponds to the standard English translation used in Waiting for Godot, Act I, spoken by Vladimir; many quote sites cite later English editions with varying page numbers (pagination differs by edition). I could verify an exact French first-edition wording equivalent (“Voilà l’homme tout entier, s’en prenant à sa chaussure alors que c’est son pied le coupable”) being explicitly associated with the 1952 Minuit original edition by a rare-books listing. ([librairie-le-pas-sage.com](https://librairie-le-pas-sage.com/en/shop/beckett-samuel/lettres/en-attendant-godot/?utm_source=openai)) However, I was not able to open a scanned 1952 Minuit text within this search session to extract the exact French line directly from the book’s interior pages, so I’m providing the verified French rendering as reported by that specialist bookseller and treating the 1952 Minuit publication as the first publication event. For corroboration of first publication details (Paris, Minuit, 1952), see the library catalog record. ([catalog.saclibrary.org](https://catalog.saclibrary.org/Record/.b10754039?utm_source=openai)) Other candidates (1) The Birthday Oracle (Pam Carruthers, 2010) compilation95.0% ... There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.' Samuel Beckett STRENGTHS: Empathetic a...
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