Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

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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
The truth that seems discouraging does in reality only transform the courage of those strong enough to accept it; and, in any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.

Maurice Maeterlinck
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.

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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
Space is the present made visible. Time is space that is on the move and becoming the future or the past. Space is time extended; it is horizontal time; time is space perpendicular, vertical space. Space is time that endures; time is space that flies.

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the archives of the world before we possess the last word that the Gnat has to say to us.

Maurice Maeterlinck
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
Because I have stirred a few grains of sand on the shore, am I in a position to know the depths of the ocean?

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
Scientifically, Nature is a riddle without a definite solution to satisfy man's curiosity.

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

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. To this end we may sacrifice even the passion for sacrifice, for sacrifice never should be the means of ennoblement, but only the sign of being ennobled.

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
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
Hypothesis follows on hypothesis; the theoretical rubbish-heap accumulates; and truth ever eludes us.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
To know how not to know might well be the last word of wisdom.

Maurice Maeterlinck
It is time, under the conduct of an admirable guide, to penetrate behind the scenes of our fairy play and to study at close quarters the actors and supernumeraries [the insects], loathsome or magnificent, as the case may be, grotesque or sinister, heroic or appalling, genial or stupid and almost always improbable and unintelligible.

Maurice Maeterlinck
The infinite which our imagination seeks to embrace is nothing more than the indefinite.

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
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.

Maurice Maeterlinck
My facts shall be as accurate as though they appeared in a practical manual or scientific monograph, but I shall relate them in a somewhat livelier fashion than such works would allow, shall group them more harmoniously together, and blend them with freerer and more mature reflections.

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