Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

To attempt to explain space by time and time by space is to seek to explain the night by darkness and the darkness by the night; it is to revolve hopelessly in the circle of the unknowable.

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
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.

Maurice Maeterlinck
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.

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
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
Never mind... Don't cry... I will catch him again... [Stepping to the front of the stage and addressing the audience.] If any of you should find him, would you be so very kind as to give him back to us?... We need him for our happiness, later on...

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
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
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
Don't be alarmed … They are a little annoyed because Spring is late... Leave it to me; I will settle it all.

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

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

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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
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.

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.

Maurice Maeterlinck
I knew that if I was captured by the Germans I would be shot at once, since I have always been counted as an enemy of Germany because of my play, Le Bourgmestre de Stillemonde, which dealt with the conditions in Belgium during the German Occupation of 1918.

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

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
It is always a mistake not to close one's eyes, whether to forgive or to look better into oneself.

Maurice Maeterlinck
You know, my brothers, the nature of our business. The child you see before you, thanks to a talisman stolen from the powers of Earth, is able to take possession of the Blue Bird and thus to snatch from us the secret which we have kept since the origin of life... Now we know enough of Man to entertain no doubt as to the fate which he reserves for us once he is in possession of this secret. That is why it seems to me that any hesitation would be both foolish and criminal... It is a serious moment; the child must be done away with before it is too late...

Maurice Maeterlinck
He's not quite blue yet, but that will come, you shall see! … Take him off quick to your little girl...

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

Maurice Maeterlinck
I know that you are looking for the Blue Bird, that is to say, the great secret of things and of happiness, so that Man may make our servitude still harder. … I do not hear the Animals... Where are they?... All this concerns them as much as us... We, the Trees, must not assume the responsibility alone for the grave measures that have become necessary... On the day when Man hears that we have done what we are about to do, there will be terrible reprisals... It is right, therefore, that our agreement should be unanimous, so that our silence may be the same...

Maurice Maeterlinck
We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.

Maurice Maeterlinck