Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#2. Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#5. Isolate her, and however abundant the food or favourable the temperature, she will expire in a few days not of hunger or cold, but of loneliness.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#6. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#8. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#9. We can be born thus more than once; and each birth brings us a little nearer to our God.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#10. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#11. As gold and silver are weighed in pure water, so does the soul test its weight in silence, and the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#12. Are we to believe that earth marks the most advanced stage and the most favoured experiment? What, then, can the thought of the universe have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come no farther than this?

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#14. _ the psychology of which I speak is transcendental, and throws light on the direct relationship that exists between soul and soul, and on the sensibility as well as the extraordinary presence of the soul.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#15. I am moved by the light.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#16. This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#19. Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of your soul may sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central channel of love.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#20. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#21. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#23. To learn to love, one must first learn to see.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#26. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#28. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#30. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#32. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#33. Death descends upon us to take away a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#36. I count only the hours that are serene.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#38. 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 only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#39. Have we," asks Claude de Saint-Martin, the great 'unknown philosopher,' "have we advanced one step further on the radiant path of enlightenment, that leads to the simplicity of men?" Let us wait in silence: perhaps ere long we shall be conscious of "the murmur of the gods.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#40. We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#41. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#42. Never for an instant does God cease to speak; but no one thinks of opening the doors. And yet, with a little watchfulness, it were not difficult to hear the word that God must speak concerning our every act.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#44. The living are just the dead on holiday

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#46. Besides, I myself have now for a long time ceased to look for anything more beautiful in this world, or more interesting, than the truth; or at least than the effort one is able to make towards the truth.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#48. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#49. To love thus is to love according to the soul; and there is no soul that does not respond to this love. For the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back, and never has it to be summoned twice to the nuptial feast.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#52. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#54. Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of our life depends on so little.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#57. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#58. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#60. Bees will not work except in darkness;
Thought will not work except in Silence;
neither will Virtue Work except in secrecy.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#63. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#64. But cannot we live as though we always loved? It was this that the saints and heroes did; this and nothing more.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#68. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#71. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#72. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#75. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#76. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#78. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#79. We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#82. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#83. No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#84. A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#85. 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.

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck