Maeterlinck Quotes & Sayings

It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom. — 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 value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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. — Maurice Maeterlinck

The dog is the only living being that has found and recognizes an indubitable, tangible and definite god. He knows to whom above him to give himself. He has not to seek for a superior and infinite power. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

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. — Maurice Maeterlinck

No great inner event befalls those who summon it not. — 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

Are we to believe that earth marks the most advanced stage and the most favoured experiment? What, then, can the thought of the universe have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come no farther than this? — 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 never for one instant seen clearly within myself. How then would you have me judge the deeds of others? — 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

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. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

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

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

We possess only the happiness we able to understand. — 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

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

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

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

The living are just the dead on holiday — Maurice Maeterlinck

This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

In all truth might it be said that beauty is the unique aliment of our soul, for in all places does it search for beauty, and it perishes not of hunger even in the most degraded of lives. For indeed nothing of beauty can pass by and be altogether unperceived. Perhaps does it never pass by save only in our unconsciousness, but its action is no less puissant in gloom of night than by light of day; the joy it procures may be less tangible, but other difference there is none. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

Death descends upon us to take away a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone. — Maurice Maeterlinck

Sometimes the male flowers rise to the surface when there are not yet any pistillated flowers in the vicinity. And at other times, when low water permits them easily to reach their companions, they still break their stems no less automatically and uselessly. I maintain here, once again, that the whole genius rests in the species, in life or nature, and that the individual on the whole is stupid. Only in mankind do we find true emulation of the two intelligences, an increasingly precise and active tendency toward a kind of balance that is the great secret of our future. — Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Maeterlinck's play The Blue Bird. — Gretchen Rubin

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

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

We possess only the happiness we are able to understand. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

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

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. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it. — Maurice Maeterlinck

Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of our life depends on so little. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me - to me who am to die outright - of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death! — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Be good at the depth of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man. — Maurice Maeterlinck

Once at a potent leader's voice I stayed; Once I went back when a good monarch prayed; Mortals, howe'er we grieve, howe'er deplore, The flying shadow will return no more. — Maurice Maeterlinck

I count only the hours that are serene. — Maurice Maeterlinck

As gold and silver are weighed in pure water, so does the soul test its weight in silence, and the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round. — 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

And it is because we all of us know of this sombre power and its perilous manifestations, that we stand in so deep a dread of silence. We can bear, when need must be, the silence of ourselves, that of isolation: but the silence of many - silence multiplied - and above all the silence of a crowd - these are supernatural burdens, whose inexplicable weight brings dread to the mightiest soul. — 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

It is a thing that knows no limit, and before it all men are equal; and the silence of king or slave, in presence of death, or grief, or love, reveals the same features, hides beneath its impenetrable mantle the self-same treasure. For this is the essential silence of our soul, our most inviolable sanctuary, and its secret can never be lost; — 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

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

Brave old-flowers! Wall-flowers, Gilly flowers, Stocks! For even as the field-flowers, from which a trifle, a ray of beauty, a drop of perfume, divides them, they have charming names, the softest in the language; and each of them, like tiny, art-less ex-votos, or like medals bestowed by the gratitude of men, proudly bears three or four. — Maurice Maeterlinck

Besides, I myself have now for a long time ceased to look for anything more beautiful in this world, or more interesting, than the truth; or at least than the effort one is able to make towards the truth. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

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

Maeterlinck says that compared with ordinary truths mystic truths have strange privileges they can neither age nor die. Beauty is eternal and ugliness, thank God, is ephemeral. Can there be any question as to which should attract the poet? — Florence Earle Coates

Never for an instant does God cease to speak; but no one thinks of opening the doors. And yet, with a little watchfulness, it were not difficult to hear the word that God must speak concerning our every act. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of your soul may sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central channel of love. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Perhaps we do not yet know what the word "to love" means. There are within us lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it. At moments we might believe it to be a recollection, furtive but excessively keen, of great primitive unity. There is in this love a force that nothing can resist. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life. Though you have but a little room, do you fancy that God is not there, too, and it is impossible to live therein a life that shall be somewhat lofty? Do you imagine that you can possibly be alone, that love can be a thing one knows, a thing one sees; that events can be weighed like the gold and silver of ransom? — 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

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. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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. — 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

Must we always be warned, and can we only fall on our knees when some one is there to tell us that God is passing by? If you have loved profoundly you have needed no one to tell you that your soul was a thing as great in itself as the world; that the stars, the flowers, the waves of night and sea were not solitary; that it was on the threshold of appearances that everything began, but nothing ended, and that the very lips you kissed belonged to a creature who was loftier, much purer, and much more beautiful than the one whom your arms enfolded. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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. — Maurice Maeterlinck

There needs but so little to encourage beauty in our soul; so little to awaken the slumbering angels; or perhaps is there no need of awakening --- it is enough that we lull them not to sleep. It requires more effort to fall, perhaps, than to rise. Can we, without putting constraint upon ourselves, confine our thoughts to everyday things at times when the sea stretches before us, and we are face to face with the night? And what soul is there but knows that it is ever confronting the sea, ever in presence of an eternal night? — 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

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

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

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. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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. — Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

I am moved by the light. — 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

(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

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