Of what avail are my loftiest thoughts if I have ceased to exist?” there are some will ask; to whom others, it may be, will answer, “What becomes of myself if all that I love in my heart and my spirit must die, that my life may be saved?” And are not almost all the morals, and heroism, and virtue of man summed up in that single choice?

— Maurice Maeterlinck

Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of our life depends on so little.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

Our real life is not the life we live, and we feel that our deepest, nay, our most intimate thoughts are quite apart from ourselves, for we are other than our thoughts and our dreams. And it is only at special moments – it may be by merest accident – that we live our own life. Will the day ever dawn when we shall be what we are? …

— Maurice Maeterlinck

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

Should we not invariably act in this life as though the God whom our heart desires with its highest desire were watching our every action?

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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

The angels that dry our eyes bear the form and the features of all we have said and thought—above all, of what we have done, prior to the hour of misfortune.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

The future is a world limited by ourselves-in it we discover only what concerns us.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.

— Maurice Maeterlinck