Top 100 Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The living are just the dead on holiday.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

2. “At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

— Maurice Maeterlinck

5. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

6. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

7. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

— Maurice Maeterlinck

9. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

10. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

— Maurice Maeterlinck

13. “Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

14. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

15. “Wisdom requires no form; her beauty must vary, as varies the beauty of flame. She is no motionless goddess, for ever couched on her throne.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

16. “All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

17. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

18. “El dolor es inevitable, el sufrimiento es opcional.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

19. “An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

— Maurice Maeterlinck

21. “There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

22. “I count only the hours that are serene.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

23. “The hour of justice does not strike On the dials of this world.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

24. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

25. “Can it be that man is nothing but a frightened god?”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

26. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

27. “The truth that seems discouraging does in reality only transform the courage of those strong enough to accept it; and, in any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

28. “Men’s weaknesses are often necessary to the purposes of life.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

29. “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.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

30. “To be happy is only to have freed one’s soul from the unrest of unhappiness.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

31. “Above all, let us never forget that an act of goodness is in itself an act of happiness. It is the flower of a long inner life of joy and contentment; it tells of peaceful hours and days on the sunniest heights of our soul.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

32. “I am moved by the light.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

33. “I have never for one instant seen clearly within myself. How then would you have me judge the deeds of others?”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

34. “You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

35. “To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

36. “Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

37. “To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

38. “The dog who meets with a good master is the happier of the two.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

— Maurice Maeterlinck

41. “No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

42. “It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

43. “If you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly, even so shall you love your neighbor.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

44. “We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

45. “Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

46. “We possess only the happiness we able to understand.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

47. “What man is there that does not laboriously, though all unconsciously, himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

— Maurice Maeterlinck

49. “The souls of all our brethren are ever hovering about us, craving for a caress, and only waiting for the signal.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck

50. “We can never judge a soul above the high water mark of our own.”

— Maurice Maeterlinck