Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

“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.”

“As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes.

We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.”

“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.”

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

“At every crossway on the path that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear that the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended.

The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight that nature drags along.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.”

“The living are just the dead on holiday”

“The manner in which the hours of freedom are spent determines, no less than labor and war, the moral worth of a nation.”

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

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

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

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

“We possess only the happiness we able to understand.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Every year, in November, at the season that follows the hour of the dead, the crowning and majestic hours of autumn, I go to visit the chrysanthemums ... They are indeed, the most universal, the most diverse of flowers.”

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

“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.”

“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.”