A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.
Maurice Maeterlinck

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
Maurice Maeterlinck

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

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

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
Maurice Maeterlinck

Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence.
Maurice Maeterlinck

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.
Maurice Maeterlinck

It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.
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.
Maurice Maeterlinck

No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.
Maurice Maeterlinck


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

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

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.
Maurice Maeterlinck

They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors.
Maurice Maeterlinck

To be happy is only to have freed one's soul from the unrest of unhappiness.
Maurice Maeterlinck

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

We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.
Maurice Maeterlinck

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