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

Maurice Maeterlinck

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Maurice Maeterlinck
Age: 86 †
Born: 1862
Born: August 29
Died: 1949
Died: May 5
Author
Essayist
Librettist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
Gent
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
Words
Thing
Trying
Strangely
Diminish
Express
Soon

More quotes by Maurice Maeterlinck

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The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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I count only the hours that are serene.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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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.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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At every crossway on the path that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear that the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight that nature drags along.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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And on this earth of ours there are but few souls that can withstand the dominion of the soul that has suffered itself to become beautiful.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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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
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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
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To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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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
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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.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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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
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It's good to slowly come to the realization that you understand nothing.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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The dog who meets with a good master is the happier of the two.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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We can never judge a soul above the high water mark of our own.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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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
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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
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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.
Maurice Maeterlinck