M Maeterlinck Quotes

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#2. 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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#4. 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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#6. 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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Maeterlinck says that compared with ordinary truths mystic truths have strange privileges they can neither age nor die. Beauty is eternal and ugliness, thank God, is ephemeral. Can there be any question as to which should attract the poet?

Florence Earle Coates

#14. 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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#17. 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

#18. I am moved by the light.

Maurice Maeterlinck

#19. _ 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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#25. 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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

#27. 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

#28. 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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Maurice Maeterlinck