Quotes by "Maurice Maeterlinck"

There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.

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

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

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.

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

What man is there that does not laboriously, though all unconsciously, himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life.

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?

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.

For it is our most secret desire that governs and dominates all. If your eyes look for nothing but evil, you will always see evil triumphant; but if you have learned to let your glance rest on sincerity, simpleness, truth, you will ever discover, deep down in all things, the silent overpowering victory of that which you love.

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.

For what are in reality the things we call ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Virtue,’ ‘Heroism,’ ‘sublime hours,’ and ‘great moments of life,’ but the moments when we have more or less issued forth from ourselves, and have been able to halt, be it only for an instant, on the step of one of the eternal gates whence we see that the faintest cry, the most colourless thought, and most nerveless gestures do not drop into nothingness; …

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

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

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

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.

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

No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.

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