Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard MaeterlinckMaeterlinck from 1932; in Belgium, in France; 29 August 1862 – 6 May 1949) was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was a Fleming, but wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy...
NationalityBelgian
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth29 August 1862
CountryBelgium
The souls of all our brethren are ever hovering about us, craving for a caress, and only waiting for the signal.
I have never for one instant seen clearly within myself. How then would you have me judge the deeds of others?
We can never judge a soul above the high water mark of our own.
He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.
The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.
To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.
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 ...
It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom.
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.
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
Is not every action of Hamlet induced by a fanatical impulse, which tells him that duty consists in revenge alone? And dose it need superhuman efforts to recognize that revenge never can be duty? I say again that Hamlet thinks much, but that he is by no means wise.
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.
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.