Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

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

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

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.

It's good to slowly come to the realization that you understand nothing.

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

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

The living are just the dead on holiday

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

The thoughts you think will irradiate you as though you are a transparent vase.

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

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another.

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

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

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.

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

Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily.

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

They think that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors, and they do not know that it is in the soul that things always happen, and that the world does not end at their housedoor.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I am moved by the light.

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