Maurice Maeterlinck Quotes

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

Language is always burdened by thought.

If the skin were parchment and the blows you gave were ink, Your own handwriting would tell you what I think.

I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord? HAMLET: Words, words, words.

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

Being that can be understood is language.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

I like delivering a message, but what I find interesting is providing those details in a different context. Then the readers can make up their minds what it means.

GIFT You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.