Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Maurice Maeterlinck

Image
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
Image
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.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The dog is the only living being that has found and recognizes an indubitable, tangible and definite god. He knows to whom above him to give himself. He has not to seek for a superior and infinite power.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
It is death that is the guide of our life, and our life has no goal but death.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
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
Image
How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
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.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
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
Image
All mothers are rich when they love their children. There are no poor mothers, no ugly ones, no old ones. Their love is always the most beautiful of joys.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
We can never judge a soul above the high water mark of our own.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
To be happy is only to have freed one's soul from the unrest of unhappiness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Image
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
Image
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