Maurice Maeterlinck quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Maeterlinck Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Maurice Maeterlinck on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The living are just the dead on holiday

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I am moved by the light.

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

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

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

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.

I count only the hours that are serene.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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