Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

It is only too evident that the invisible agitations of the kingdoms within us are arbitrarily set on foot by the thoughts we shelter. Our myriad intuitions are the veiled queens who steer our course through life, though we have no words in which to speak of them. How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words!

We can be born thus more than once; and each birth brings us a little nearer to our God.

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. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other.

At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past.

It feels like I’ve got all the flames in hell burning in my head.

It is well to believe that there needs but a little more thought, a little more courage, more love, more devotion to life, a little more eagerness, one day to fling open wide the portals of joy and of truth.

Perhaps we do not yet know what the word “to love” means. There are within us lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it. At moments we might believe it to be a recollection, furtive but excessively keen, of great primitive unity. There is in this love a force that nothing can resist.

Truly they who know still know nothing if the strength of love be not theirs; for the true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind. He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.

Niemand is waarlijk mijn vriend, voordat we geleerd hebben in elkanders tegenwoordigheid te zwijgen.

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.

Evităm să ne gândim la moarte până când nu mai avem forța, n-aș spune, de a gândi, ci chiar de a respira.

We know that, if a third or a fourth part of the fabulous sums expended on extermination and destruction had been devoted to works of peace, all the iniquities that poison the air we breathe would have been triumphantly redressed and that the social question, the one great question, that matter of life and death which justice demands that posterity should face, would have found its definite solution, once and for all, in a happiness which now perhaps even our sons and grandsons will not realize. We know that the disappearance of two or three million young existences, cut down when they were on the point of bearing fruit, will leave in history a void that will not be easily filled, even as we know that among those dead were mighty intellects, treasures of genius which will not come back again and which contained inventions and discoveries that will now perhaps be lost to us for centuries.

Is there any more cruel inadvertence or ordeal in na­ture Picture the tragedy of that longing, the inac­cessible so nearly attained, the transparent fatality, the impossible with not a visible obstacle! . . . It would be insoluble, like our own tragedy upon this earth, were it not that an unex­pected element is mingled with it. Did the males foresee the disillusion to which they would be sub­jected? One thing is certain, that they have locked up in their hearts a bubble of air, even as we lock up in our souls a thought of desperate deliverance. It is as though they hesitated for a moment; then, with a magnificent effort, the finest, the most supernatural that I know of in the annals of the insects and the flowers, in order to rise to happiness they deliberately break the bond that attaches them to life. They tear themselves from their peduncle and, with an incomparable flight, amid pearly beads of glad­ness, their petals dart up and break the surface of the water. Wounded to death, but radiant and free, they float for a moment beside their heedless brides and the union is accom­plished, whereupon the victims drift away to perish, while the wife, already a mother, closes her corolla, in which lives their last breath, rolls up her spiral and descends to the depths, there to ripen the fruit of the heroic kiss.

A single hour snatched from death outweighs a whole existence of tortures.

دنیا برای چه ما و سایر موجودات را به وجود آورده؟... آیا برای این ما را به وجود آورد که خود را تنها می دید و در تنهایی خویشتن را سعادتمند نمی دانست؟... و آیا برای این که او سعادتمند نیست ما و سایر موجودات هم سعادتمند نیستیم؟
ولی فراموش نکنید که وقتی ما در خصوص تصمیمات جهان، آفریننده و یا هر چیز دیگر که به جایش بگذارید، صحبت می کنیم عینا مثل است که یک پشه بخواهد در خصوص تصمیمات ما که انسان هستیم صحبت و تفکر نماید و یا کور مادرزاد بخواهد رنگ های مختلف را توصیف کند