Quotes from Maurice Maeterlinck

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

No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

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

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

We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.

Many a happiness in life, a many a disaster, is due to chance alone; but the peace within us can never be governed by chance.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

In any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.

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.

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.