Success Quote by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett compresses a bracing philosophy into three hammer blows that sound like footsteps: try, fail, try, fail, try, fail. The stark cadence turns persistence into an act of rhythm rather than triumph. These lines come from his late prose work Worstward Ho (1983), a period when he was stripping language to the bone and circling the problem of saying the unsayable. The fuller passage begins, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better". It is not a pep talk; it is a discipline of lucidity.

Failure, for Beckett, is not a temporary obstacle en route to success but the fundamental condition of human projects. Language fails to capture experience cleanly; intention fails to bind the world; bodies fail over time. After the devastations of the 20th century, the old certainties looked broken, and Beckett wrote as if starting from the rubble. Yet he refuses paralysis. The imperative remains: continue. If success is not guaranteed, perhaps it is not even the point. To fail better is to refine attention, shed illusion, and move closer to accuracy, however incomplete. Each attempt clarifies what does not work and what must be relinquished.

This ethic runs through his theater, where repetition and stasis become engines of thought. In Waiting for Godot, characters keep returning to the same place, their restarts both comic and tragic. In Worstward Ho, he reduces even the scene to almost nothing: "Say a body. Where none". The work acknowledges impossibility and still inches forward.

Modern culture often recruits these lines as motivational slogans, but their power lies in the absence of promises. The phrase invites craft rather than conquest: draft after draft, experiment after experiment, conversation after conversation, a willingness to be corrected and to continue. It treats humility as a method. To fail better is to accept finitude and keep working toward clearer forms of truth, knowing that perfection will not arrive, and going on anyway.