Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?.

An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.

Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence.

Every year, in November, at the season that follows the hour of the dead, the crowning and majestic hours of autumn, I go to visit the chrysanthemums ... They are indeed, the most universal, the most diverse of flowers.

If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

The living are just the dead on holiday

We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.

Many a happiness in life, a many a disaster, is due to chance alone; but the peace within us can never be governed by chance.

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.

An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

Wisdom requires no form; her beauty must vary, as varies the beauty of flame. She is no motionless goddess, for ever couched on her throne.

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

At every crossroad on the way that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past.

To be happy is only to have freed one's soul from the unrest of unhappiness.

Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.

Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?

Brave old-flowers! Wall-flowers, Gilly flowers, Stocks! For even as the field-flowers, from which a trifle, a ray of beauty, a drop of perfume, divides them, they have charming names, the softest in the language; and each of them, like tiny, art-less ex-votos, or like medals bestowed by the gratitude of men, proudly bears three or four.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another.

To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles-is this not to master the future?

Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily.

Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.

We can never judge a soul above the high water mark of our own.

Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.

All mothers are rich when they love their children. There are no poor mothers, no ugly ones, no old ones. Their love is always the most beautiful of joys.

(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")

To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.

They think that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors, and they do not know that it is in the soul that things always happen, and that the world does not end at their housedoor.

I count only the hours that are serene.

I have never for one instant seen clearly within myself. How then would you have me judge the deeds of others?

Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this, there can be no nobler aim in life.

The dog who meets with a good master is the happier of the two.

No living creature, not even man, has achieved, in the centre of his sphere, what the bee has achieved in her own: and were some one from another world to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation of the logic of life, we should needs have to offer the humble comb of honey.

If you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly, even so shall you love your neighbor.

It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.

In the world which we know, among the different and primitive geniuses that preside over the evolution of the several species, there exists not one, excepting that of the dog, that ever gave a thought to the presence of man.

In any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.

You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.

It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.

It is death that is the guide of our life, and our life has no goal but death.

I have done what I could do in life, and if I could not do better, I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.

An obstacle is not a discouragement. It may become one, but only with our own consent. So long as we refuse to be discouraged, we cannot be discouraged.

Above all, let us never forget that an act of goodness is in itself an act of happiness. It is the flower of a long inner life of joy and contentment; it tells of peaceful hours and days on the sunniest heights of our soul.

And on this earth of ours there are but few souls that can withstand the dominion of the soul that has suffered itself to become beautiful.

What man is there that does not laboriously, though all unconsciously, himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life.

The truth that seems discouraging does in reality only transform the courage of those strong enough to accept it; and, in any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.