Quotes by Maurice Maeterlinck

• It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.
• How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.
• Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence.
• Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
• All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
• At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.
• 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.
• A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.
• We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.
• They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors.
• When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
• We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.
• To be happy is only to have freed one's soul from the unrest of unhappiness.
• 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.
• No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.
• Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.
• Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.
• 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.