Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

Death descends upon us to take away a life or change its form: let us judge it by what it does and not by what we do before it comes and after it is gone.

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough. If we always had smiled on the one who is gone, there would be no despair in our grief; and some sweetness would cling to our tears, reminiscent of virtues and happiness. For our recollections of veritable love — which indeed is the act of virtue containing all others — call from our eyes the same sweet, tender tears as those most beautiful hours wherein memory was born.

Sometimes the male flowers rise to the surface when there are not yet any pistillated flowers in the vicinity. And at other times, when low water permits them easily to reach their companions, they still break their stems no less automatically and uselessly. I maintain here, once again, that the whole genius rests in the species, in life or nature, and that the individual on the whole is stupid. Only in mankind do we find true emulation of the two intelligences, an increasingly precise and active tendency toward a kind of balance that is the great secret of our future.

"Sobre las vallisnerias: "(...), para elevarse hasta la felicidad, rompen deliberadamente el lazo que los une a la existencia. Se arrancan de su pedúnculo, y con un incomparable impulso, entre perlas de alegría, sus pétalos van a romper la superficie del agua. Heridos de muerte, pero radiantes y libres, flotan un momento al lado de sus indolentes prometidas; se verifica la unión, después de lo cual los sacrificios van a perecer a merced de la corriente, mientras que la esposa ya madre cierra su corola en que vive su último soplo, arrolla su espiral y vuelve a bajar a las profundidades para madurar en ellas el fruto del beso heroico

Treasures have perished that were numbered among the noblest and dearest possessions of mankind; monuments have disappeared which nothing can replace; and the half of a nation, among all nations the most attached to its old simple habits, its humble homes, is at present wandering along the roads of Europe. Thousands of innocent people have been massacred; and of those who remain nearly all are doomed to poverty and hunger.

No nation permits herself to be coerced to the one crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own accord that she hastens towards it; her chief has no need to persuade, it is she who urges him on.

"نويسنده كتاب "عقل الملل" نوشته است كه : "با دنيا همانطور كه هست كنار بيائيد."
ولی اگر ما همانطوری كه دنيا هست با او كنار می آمديم هنوز تمدن ما نظير تمدن دوره سنگ بود.
خوشبختانه اشخاصی هستند كه با دنيا طور ديگری كنار می آيند و همواره بر خلاف خط سير آن حركت می كنند و در سايه وجود اين اشخاص است كه ما دارای تمدن كنونی شده ايم."

And all this, I repeat, occurred without any material necessity, from no other motive than a fine sense of honour and a magnificent surge of admiration and pity for a small foreign nation that was being unjustly martyred. We cannot repeat it too often: here, as in the case of the sacrifice which Belgium and England offered to the ideal of honour, is a new and unprecedented fact in history

Thanks to the heroism of the Allies, the hour is approaching when the hordes of William the Madman will quit the soil of afflicted Belgium. After what they have done in cold blood, what excesses, what disasters must we not expect of the last convulsions of their rage? Our anguish is all the more poignant in that they are at this moment fighting in the most ancient and most precious portion of Flanders.

he who takes upon himself to write pledges himself to say nothing that can derogate from the respect and love which we owe to all men. I have had to utter these words; and I am as much surprised as saddened at what I have been constrained to say by the force of events and of truth. I loved Germany and numbered friends there, who now, dead or living, are alike dead to me. I thought her great and upright and generous; and to me she was ever kindly and hospitable. But there are crimes that obliterate the past and close the future. In rejecting hatred I should have shown myself a traitor to love.

Observamos aquí, una vez más, que todo el genio reside en la especie, la vida o la naturaleza; y que el individuo es más o menos estúpido. Sólo en el hombre hay emulación real entre las dos inteligencias, tendencia cada vez más precisa, cada vez más activa a una especie de equilibrio que es el gran secreto de nuestro porvenir.

And indeed, if we had only the courage to listen to the simplest, the nearest, most pressing voice of our conscience, and be deaf to all else, it were doubtless our solitary duty to relieve the suffering about us to the greatest extent in our power.

But how much care and study are needed to succeed in fulfilling this duty! And how complicated it has become since the days of the silent caverns and the great deserted lakes! It was all so simple, then, so easy and so clear. The lonely hollow opened upon the side of the hill, and all that approached, all that moved on the horizon of the plains or woods, was the unmistakable enemy.... But to-day you can no longer tell.... You have to acquaint yourself with a civilization of which you disapprove, to appear to understand a thousand incomprehensible things.... Thus, it seems evident that henceforth the whole world no longer belongs to the master, that his property conforms to unintelligible limits....

Have we,” asks Claude de Saint-Martin, the great ‘unknown philosopher,’ “have we advanced one step further on the radiant path of enlightenment, that leads to the simplicity of men?” Let us wait in silence: perhaps ere long we shall be conscious of “the murmur of the gods.

Why not admit that it is not our paramount duty to weep with all those who are weeping, to suffer with all who are sad, to expose our heart to the passer-by for him to caress or stab? Tears and suffering and wounds are helpful to us only when they do not discourage our life.