There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")

— Maurice Maeterlinck

There may be human joy in doing good with definite purpose, but they who do good expecting nothing in return know a joy that is divine.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

There needs but so little to encourage beauty in our soul; so little to awaken the slumbering angels; or perhaps is there no need of awakening --- it is enough that we lull them not to sleep. It requires more effort to fall, perhaps, than to rise. Can we, without putting constraint upon ourselves, confine our thoughts to everyday things at times when the sea stretches before us, and we are face to face with the night? And what soul is there but knows that it is ever confronting the sea, ever in presence of an eternal night?

— Maurice Maeterlinck

This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of your soul may sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central channel of love.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

To learn to love, one must first learn to see.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

To love one’s neighbor in the immovable depths means to love in others that which is eternal; for one’s neighbor, in the truest sense of the term, is that which approaches the nearest to God; in other words, all that is best and purest in man; and it is only by ever lingering near the gates I spoke of, that you can discover the divine in the soul.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

To love thus is to love according to the soul; and there is no soul that does not respond to this love. For the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back, and never has it to be summoned twice to the nuptial feast.

— Maurice Maeterlinck