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

Categorized in : Enemy Play Germany

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?.

Maurice Maeterlinck

shadow events worry

Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence.

Maurice Maeterlinck

absent knows

To be happy is only to have freed one's soul from the unrest of unhappiness.

Maurice Maeterlinck

unhappiness unrest soul

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

different loneliness dark

At every crossroad on the way that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past.

Maurice Maeterlinck

fear inspirational life

Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.

Maurice Maeterlinck

greater positive ideas

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

fashion communication real

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

Maurice Maeterlinck

diminish trying

If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.

Maurice Maeterlinck

bees-and-honey men years

We can never judge a soul above the high water mark of our own.

Maurice Maeterlinck

inspirational-life judging water

It's good to slowly come to the realization that you understand nothing.

Maurice Maeterlinck

realization

The living are just the dead on holiday

Maurice Maeterlinck

holiday death

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

Maurice Maeterlinck

happy joy happiness

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

soul whole world

Many a happiness in life, a many a disaster, is due to chance alone; but the peace within us can never be governed by chance.

Maurice Maeterlinck

life-happiness disaster chance

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

thrones flames wisdom

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

Maurice Maeterlinck

pain education death

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.

Maurice Maeterlinck

path men past

No living creature, not even man, has achieved, in the centre of his sphere, what the bee has achieved in her own: and were some one from another world to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation of the logic of life, we should needs have to offer the humble comb of honey.

Maurice Maeterlinck

humble perfect men

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

gratitude wall art