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The manner in which the hours of freedom are spent determines, no less than labor and war, the moral worth of a nation.

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
Nations
Determines
Hours
Manner
Freedom
Determine
Less
Spent
War
Labor
Nation
Worth
Moral

More quotes by Maurice Maeterlinck

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I count only the hours that are serene.
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All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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We can never judge a soul above the high water mark of our own.
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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.
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The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.
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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.
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To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
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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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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An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.
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.
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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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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