We suffer but little from suffering itself; but from the manner wherein we accept it overwhelming sorrow may spring. We are wrong in believing that … - Maurice Maeterlinck

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.

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.

There needs but so little to encourage beauty in our soul; so little to awaken the slumbering angels; or perhaps is there no need of awakening — - it is enough that we lull them not to sleep. It requires more effort to fall, perhaps, than to rise. Can we, without putting constraint upon ourselves, confine our thoughts to everyday things at times when the sea stretches before us, and we are face to face with the night? And what soul is there but knows that it is ever confronting the sea, ever in presence of an eternal night?