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

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If you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly, even so shall you love your neighbor.
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The dog who meets with a good master is the happier of the two.
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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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To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
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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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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 happy is only to have freed one's soul from the unrest of unhappiness.
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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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An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness.
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Physical suffering apart, not a single sorrow exists that can touch us except through our thoughts.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention.
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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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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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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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All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.
Maurice Maeterlinck