Quotes by Maurice Maeterlinck

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

Of what avail are my loftiest thoughts if I have ceased to exist?” there are some will ask; to whom others, it may be, will answer, “What becomes of myself if all that I love in my heart and my spirit must die, that my life may be saved?” And are not almost all the morals, and heroism, and virtue of man summed up in that single choice?

I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.

The angels that dry our eyes bear the form and the features of all we have said and thought—above all, of what we have done, prior to the hour of misfortune.

To learn to love, one must first learn to see.

Unless we close our eyes we are always deceived.

Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention; and what we term justice is truly nothing but this equilibrium transformed, as honey is nothing but a transformation of the sweetness found in the flower. Outside man there is no justice; within him injustice cannot be.

We are not wrong, perhaps, to be heedful of justice in the midst of a universe that heeds not at all; as the bee is not wrong to make honey in a world that itself can make none. But we are wrong to desire an external justice, since we know that it does not exist. Let that which is in us suffice. All is for ever being weighed and judged in our soul. It is we who shall judge ourselves; or rather, our happiness is our judge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.