Quotes from Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.

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.

The future is a world limited by ourselves-in it we discover only what concerns us.

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

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

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.

We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.

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

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

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

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

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

The living are just the dead on holiday

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

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

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.