Maurice Maeterlinck Quotations

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

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

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

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

We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.

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

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.

No great inner event befalls those who summon it not

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

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

They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors.

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. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

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

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

A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.

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

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.

The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most.

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.

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

The hour of justice does not strike On the dials of this world.

I am moved by the light.

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

There is no soul that does not respond to love, for the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back.

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.

The dog is the only living being that has found and recognizes an indubitable, tangible and definite god. He knows to whom above him to give himself. He has not to seek for a superior and infinite power.

The thoughts you think will irradiate you as though you are a transparent vase.

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.

There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.

The true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind.

The souls of all our brethren are ever hovering about us, craving for a caress, and only waiting for the signal.

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

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

He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.

The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.

To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

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 ...

It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom.

Sacrifice may be a flower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this flower that virtue set forth on its travels.

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

Is not every action of Hamlet induced by a fanatical impulse, which tells him that duty consists in revenge alone? And dose it need superhuman efforts to recognize that revenge never can be duty? I say again that Hamlet thinks much, but that he is by no means wise.

At every crossway on the path that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear that the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight that nature drags along.

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.

Men's weaknesses are often necessary to the purposes of life.

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.

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

We should tell ourselves once and for all that it is the first duty of the soul to become as happy, complete, independent, and great as lies in its power. To this end we may sacrifice even the passion for sacrifice, for sacrifice never should be the means of ennoblement, but only the sign of being ennobled.

Once at a potent leader's voice I stayed; Once I went back when a good monarch prayed; Mortals, howe'er we grieve, howe'er deplore, The flying shadow will return no more.

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.

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.

It is far more important that one's life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord.

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

Physical suffering apart, not a single sorrow exists that can touch us except through our thoughts.

It's good to slowly come to the realization that you understand nothing.

Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I knew that if I was captured by the Germans I would be shot at once, since I have always been counted as an enemy of Germany because of my play, Le Bourgmestre de Stillemonde, which dealt with the conditions in Belgium during the German Occupation of 1918.

I count only the hours that are serene.

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

(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")

The living are just the dead on holiday

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The manner in which the hours of freedom are spent determines, no less than labor and war, the moral worth of a nation.

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 decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.