Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

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
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
To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The future is a world limited by ourselves-in it we discover only what concerns us.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
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
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
Maurice Maeterlinck
There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
Maurice Maeterlinck
There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
When we lose one we love our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
Maurice Maeterlinck
There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention; and what we term justice is truly nothing but this equilibrium transformed, as honey is nothing but a transformation of the sweetness found in the flower. Outside man there is no justice; within him injustice cannot be.
Maurice Maeterlinck
We are not wrong, perhaps, to be heedful of justice in the midst of a universe that heeds not at all; as the bee is not wrong to make honey in a world that itself can make none. But we are wrong to desire an external justice, since we know that it does not exist. Let that which is in us suffice. All is for ever being weighed and judged in our soul. It is we who shall judge ourselves; or rather, our happiness is our judge.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Unless we close our eyes we are always deceived.
Maurice Maeterlinck
To learn to love, one must first learn to see.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The angels that dry our eyes bear the form and the features of all we have said and thought—above all, of what we have done, prior to the hour of misfortune.
Maurice Maeterlinck
I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Of what avail are my loftiest thoughts if I have ceased to exist?” there are some will ask; to whom others, it may be, will answer, “What becomes of myself if all that I love in my heart and my spirit must die, that my life may be saved?” And are not almost all the morals, and heroism, and virtue of man summed up in that single choice?
Maurice Maeterlinck
Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.
Maurice Maeterlinck
We should tell ourselves, once and for all, that it is the first duty of the soul to become as happy, complete, independent, and great as lies in its power. Herein is no egoism, or pride. To become effectually generous and sincerely humble there must be within us a confident, tranquil, and clear comprehension of all that we owe to ourselves.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another ...
Maurice Maeterlinck
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
When once misfortune enters a house, silence is in vain.
Maurice Maeterlinck
However imperfect our conception of virtue, still let us cling to it; for a moment’s forgetfulness exposes us to all the malignant forces from without. The simplest lie to myself, buried though it may be in the silence of my soul, may yet be as dangerous to my inner liberty as an act of treachery on the marketplace. Widfom and Destiny
Maurice Maeterlinck
A thought that is almost beautiful – a thought that you speak not, but that you cherish within you at this moment, will irradiate you as though you were a transparent vase.
Maurice Maeterlinck
It is sad to love and be unloved, but sadder still to be unable to love.
Maurice Maeterlinck
(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")
Maurice Maeterlinck