Introduction to Absurd Drama (1965) http://www.samuel-beckett.net/AbsurdEsslin.html
Context: The "Theatre of the Absurd" has become a catch-phrase, much used and much abused. What does it stand for? And how can such a label be justified? Perhaps it will be best to attempt to answer the second question first. There is no organised movement, no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement — and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal vision of the world.
Yet critical concepts of this kind are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art arise.
Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni
Allen B. Rosenstein and Phillip Burgess (1988) "U.S. Competitiveness." Bureaucrat. Vol. 17-18. p. 21.
“It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain.”
April Thesis (1917)
The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers (1932)
“In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.”
Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), Chapter One : The Fear of Poetry
Context: In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.
If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much has not yet been used, much is still to be found and begun.
Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has — the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge — infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.
