Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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