Top 84 Quotes & Sayings by Maurice Maeterlinck - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom.

No great inner event befalls those who summon it not

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.