Quote

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

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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
Soul
Nothing
Whole
World
Athirst
Clings
Readily
Beauty
Anything

More quotes by Maurice Maeterlinck

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How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.
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It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom.
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Brave old-flowers! Wall-flowers, Gilly flowers, Stocks! For even as the field-flowers, from which a trifle, a ray of beauty, a drop of perfume, divides them, they have charming names, the softest in the language and each of them, like tiny, art-less ex-votos, or like medals bestowed by the gratitude of men, proudly bears three or four.
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It is death that is the guide of our life, and our life has no goal but death.
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It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.
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Every year, in November, at the season that follows the hour of the dead, the crowning and majestic hours of autumn, I go to visit the chrysanthemums ... They are indeed, the most universal, the most diverse of flowers.
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It's good to slowly come to the realization that you understand nothing.
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If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.
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The true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind.
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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.
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The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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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
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To be good we must needs have suffered but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.
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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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We can never judge a soul above the high water mark of our own.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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I knew that if I was captured by the Germans I would be shot at once, since I have always been counted as an enemy of Germany because of my play, 'Le Bourgmestre de Stillemonde,' which dealt with the conditions in Belgium during the German Occupation of 1918.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
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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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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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The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.
Maurice Maeterlinck