Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

(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")

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The living are just the dead on holiday

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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