Maurice Maeterlinck
Many a happiness in life, as many a disaster, can be due to chance, but the peace within us can never be governed by chance.Collection: Chance
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.Collection: Death
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.Collection: Love
At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.Collection: Future
We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.Collection: Happiness
It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors.
Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence.
Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.
A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.
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.
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.
We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.
To be happy is only to have freed one's soul from the unrest of unhappiness.
How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.
No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.
Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?.Collection: Worry
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.Collection: Inspirational
It's good to slowly come to the realization that you understand nothing.Collection: Realization
The living are just the dead on holidayCollection: Death
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.Collection: Positive
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Fashion
It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom.Collection: Happiness
We possess only the happiness we able to understand.Collection: Happiness
Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily.Collection: Soul
If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Believe
Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?Collection: Nature
All mothers are rich when they love their children. There are no poor mothers, no ugly ones, no old ones. Their love is always the most beautiful of joys.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Chance
No living creature, not even man, has achieved, in the centre of his sphere, what the bee has achieved in her own: and were some one from another world to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation of the logic of life, we should needs have to offer the humble comb of honey.Collection: Humble
As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Life
It is far more important that one's life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord.Collection: Important
There is no soul that does not respond to love, for the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back.Collection: Love
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.Collection: Death
We should tell ourselves once and for all that it is the first duty of the soul to become as happy, complete, independent, and great as lies in its power. To this end we may sacrifice even the passion for sacrifice, for sacrifice never should be the means of ennoblement, but only the sign of being ennobled.Collection: Happiness
Men's weaknesses are often necessary to the purposes of life.Collection: Men
Physical suffering apart, not a single sorrow exists that can touch us except through our thoughts.Collection: Suffering
No great inner event befalls those who summon it notCollection: Events
(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")Collection: Mean
If you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly, even so shall you love your neighbor.Collection: Love You
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.Collection: Acceptance
There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.Collection: Adventure
It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.Collection: Lying
Sacrifice may be a flower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this flower that virtue set forth on its travels.Collection: Flower
An obstacle is not a discouragement. It may become one, but only with our own consent. So long as we refuse to be discouraged, we cannot be discouraged.Collection: Long
The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most.Collection: Future